


Hollow

by MissMorwen



Series: Memory Lane [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, F/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Past Brainwashing, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Slow Burn, assholes to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2020-01-05 03:50:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18358025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMorwen/pseuds/MissMorwen
Summary: “I found him,” Steve says, and Natasha can tell even over the static of the long-distance call that he’s bone-tired but there’s a lilt to his voice. A cheerfulness, she hasn’t heard in months.She should feel happy for him. It has been half a year since she saw him by Fury’s empty grave. Months of hunting a ghost that doesn’t want to be found. And she is, sort of. Maybe. She’s also one-hundred percent sure that Steve didn’t find Barnes, but rather that Barnes had allowed himself to be found. “I’m glad,” she says and manages to sound like she means it. “You talked with him yet?”***********Steve finds Bucky and brings him back to New York. Natasha just wants to make sure her friend doesn't end up with his throat slit for all his trouble. Bucky and Natasha both get to work on their trust issues.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [mbuzz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mbuzz) for betaing <3

“I found him,” Steve says, and Natasha can tell even over the static of the long-distance call that he’s bone-tired but there’s a lilt to his voice. A cheerfulness, she hasn’t heard in months.

She should feel happy for him. It has been half a year since she saw him by Fury’s empty grave. Months of hunting a ghost that doesn’t want to be found. And she is, sort of. Maybe. She’s also one-hundred percent sure that Steve didn’t find Barnes, but rather that Barnes had allowed himself to be found. “I’m glad,” she says and manages to sound like she means it. “You talked with him yet?”

“Yeah, we just…” The static picks up and she thinks he might have sighed into the phone. Happily, she hopes. “I can’t believe he’s here. We talked for hours. He remembered my mom.” His voice almost breaks on the last word.

And then she _is_ happy. Because Steve is happy, he’s her friend, and he’s not naïve enough to look at a trigger-happy assassin and see his long-lost friend. At least she hopes so. “What are your plans?”

“Getting him back home, eventually. Back to New York, I mean. But sleep first.” He laughs. “It’s two in the morning here, but I wanted to let you know.”

Right. That explains the late call. He thinks she’s stateside and why wouldn’t he? She hasn’t exactly been updating him on her whereabouts. A quick glance at the clock tells Natasha he’s only an hour ahead of her. That means he could be anywhere from Finland to a generous slice of Africa, but she’s willing to bet he’s in Eastern Europe. Easier for the Winter Soldier to blend in, if a little predictable of him. “Do you want me to come pick you up? Might be difficult to get that arm through customs.” She’s only half-joking; she doesn’t know if Barnes can bypass the scanners and is more than a little curious to find out.

He hesitates. The crackle of a bad connection fills the silence. Among the SHIELD files Natasha released are her assessments of the other Avengers. The ones she wrote for Fury around the time he put the team together. Steve could have read any number of them, connected the dots. “We haven’t, ah, we haven’t talked about going back yet. We just talked about New York, back then.” He sounds embarrassed, like she caught him lying and that just worsens the twinge of guilt in the cold, dead place she calls a heart.

“No rush, Rogers. Just offering. Let me know if you change your mind.” That will leave her time to wrap things up here in Milan instead of having to go back once she’s sure Steve won’t end up with his throat slit.

“Thank you,” he says, and then adds, “I will.” Like he has already decided in the few seconds that have passed since she offered.

 _Inspires loyalty. Makes people want to live up to the good he sees in them_ , she wrote in a report on Steve, knowing Fury would take it as the warning she meant it to be. She hadn’t counted on herself being among the easily manipulated. “Alright. Say hi to Sam from me,” she says and barely waits for his reply before she hangs up.

The Winter Soldier living in New York. Now there’s a scenario Natasha hasn’t counted on unfolding this soon. She supposes she should reach out to Fury, find out what he’s planning. He must have been providing Steve with intel to allow him to track Barnes. Steve is a lot of things, but he isn’t a spy. He doesn’t have the means to track one as skilled as the Winter Soldier on his own.

Another time. When she isn’t knee-deep in her own intel about Hydra digging into the picturesque landscape outside Milan. Fury will have to wait until she’s at least reasonably sure this is just a single cell, not the first sign of Hydra popping up again all over Europe.

 

Steve calls her again a few days later. “About that lift.”

She has been waiting for his call since yesterday. Tried to play tourist, only to become exasperated by the other tourists talking too loud under the domed ceilings of beautiful, old churches, touching things they shouldn’t, and taking pictures of absolutely everything. Picked up a book and spent a few hours devouring it by a pool. Ate lunch at a café while watching people going about their lives outside. Thought about tracking Steve’s phone, discarded that temptation every time it reared its ugly head. She laughs. “That was fast.”

“Apparently, regular metal detectors aren’t a problem, but the scanners are, and the airline companies get really suspicious when you try to book a flight to and from airports without scanners,” he jokes.

“Ah, but have you tried booking through Stark Travels International?” Natasha replies in turn. She has missed this; Steve’s dry humor works in tandem with her own. If the topic had been different, she might even have enjoyed the conversation.

“I thought about it, but I don’t think he can fit all of us into one suit.”

“That’s where you have it wrong. You’re supposed to sit on Tony’s back while he wears the suit.”

He laughs and that really hammers home how relieved he is to have found Barnes. How much weight that has been lifted from his shoulders. “I’ll mention you’ve said so, but I don’t think Buck will go for it.”

Buck. That’s even worse than Bucky. She’s Russian (or she used to be) she knows all about mangling the names of loved ones and calling the Winter Soldier ‘Bucky’ is a joke. A bad one at that. She searches for a new topic, something that doesn’t force her to pretend she is A-Okay with the Winter Soldier stepping out of the shadows and into her life. “So, when do you need that lift? And where from?”

“We’re in Bucharest. Is tomorrow okay? If you have something else planned…” He lets the rest of the sentence hang there. Allowing her free rein since she’s doing him a favor from his point of view.

“I’m in Milan, I could be there in an hour if you were in a hurry.”

“You are? Why?” He doesn’t sound suspicious, more surprised than anything.

“I needed to pick something up, talk to someone,” Natasha says and it’s the absolute truth even if it leaves out details about dead Hydra agents and a base she has reduced to ruins.

“Right.” He has worked with her long enough to know when she’s willing to answer questions. “I was going to make my mom’s lamb stew tonight, Bucky said he’d missed it. You’re welcome to join us if you want to?”

“That’s okay, I need to clear a few things with the airport to make sure everything will go over smoothly. I’ll pick you up in the morning at the airport.” Eating with the three of them would be an interesting opportunity to assess Barnes in private, but it also might spook him, send him running in the night. Easier to do the initial probing on the plane where there are no easily accessible escape routes. She ends the call with a promise to text Steve with the details.

 

Natasha meets them outside the airport, having arrived early to make sure everything is in order.

Barnes looks very different from the Winter Soldier. Dressed in civilian clothes, all of it worn and bland enough not to attract attention. He hangs back, rounding his shoulders, ducking his head to appear smaller. Maybe to hide. It doesn’t work, not with her. He sticks out like a sore thumb next to the smiling faces of Sam and Steve.

“Natasha,” Steve greets her with a smile so wide it’s nearly blinding.

He gets a hug and a peck on the cheek because she does so enjoy watching him squirm. “Good to see you again, Rogers.”

“Hope we didn’t cut into your vacation time,” Sam says eyeing her.

A week and a half in Milan have given her a tan and matching highlights in her hair. “It’s what are friends for,” she says and hugs him, too.

The once-over Barnes gives her is different from Sam’s as it’s not to admire the way her clothes hugs her curves. His eyes stop on the Glock she has strapped to her side, drifts over her wrists where her stingers are hidden under the cuff of her jacket, and gives her boots concealing her knives a once-over. So, he either remembers a lot more of their confrontation in DC than Steve has given any indication of, or he has used his time wisely and read up on the files she dumped onto the internet. Only time will tell.

As far as Natasha can tell, he’s not wearing any weapons himself aside from the obvious one, the one that can only be removed by actual dismembering. It doesn’t have the range of her Glock but equal stopping power. But then his entire body is a weapon, not just the mechanical parts.

She nods at him. “Barnes.”

A smirk, then, “Romanoff.”

Steve clears his throat, making the muscle on Barnes’ jaw jump.

“Alright,” she says, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get going.”

 

* * *

 

The flight is uncomfortable, the slightest turbulence shakes the entire plane, but Bucky is well aware that saying so won’t go over well. Might even make Steve apologize. He keeps his trap shut, ignores the weightless feeling he gets every time the plane hits an air pocket. Fear of flying, yeah right. How about fear of falling? Fear hitting the ground so hard, they’d have to scrape him off it with a shovel. All that keeps him from that drop is a narrow tube of metal and plastics dressed up in plush carpets and outfitted with wide, supposedly comfortable chairs. He could put his arm through the walls with barely any resistance.

Being under the watchful eyes of the Black Widow doesn’t help. Eyes cataloging the way he twitches in his suffocating seat. Romanoff is just doing her job, he knows that, but that doesn’t make him any less squirmy. Doesn’t make him resent her less for it.

Bucky nearly jumps when Steve’s phone goes off, nods when he steps away to take it elsewhere, and shifts his focus inwards. Takes a few deep breaths and loosens his grip on the armrests to take a gulp of the bottled water waiting for him in the holder. The water is flat and tepid but helps with his dry mouth. When he puts his hands back on the armrest, there’s the splinters and cracks in the wood on the one on his left. He pushes ineffectively at the larger of the splinters, tries to make it lay flat but it springs right up again.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll buff right out,” Romanoff says, dead-pan, with a lopsided smile. She lets herself fall into the seat opposite him.

His laugh sounds more like a cough. Feels like it, too.

“Got tired of the life on the run?” She drapes her arms and hands over her armrests, makes it look elegant and nothing like the explosive energy she exhibited in DC. Her fingers hang loosely over the edge. All for show, of course, there's no way she’s naïve enough to relax around him.

“Something like that, yeah.”

“97 is a good age to settle down. Collect your pension. Maybe learn how to knit.” Her eyes never leave him except for when she blinks, and she doesn’t do that very often. It’s like being pinned down by a laser scope; no matter where Bucky runs, it follows.

“Lady, I don’t know what bull Steve’s been feeding you but I’ve known how to knit since I was 8. How do you think we kept warm during winter?” It’s easy to lie to her, as if speaking to her in her own language, nothing at all like when he lies to Steve. She doesn’t expect him to be honest, so he isn’t.

“Maybe you could teach me. All I was taught was how to stab people and that doesn’t keep you warm for long.”

“Yeah, that’s no good. Makes people look at you all wrong.” There’s another air pocket, a whole bunch of them. Somehow, he doesn’t yank out the remaining wood paneling. “Was told Fury had use for someone with my particular skill set,” he says when he can breathe again.

This smile is much smaller, but it reaches her eyes. “That sounds like something Fury would say.”

“Did he send you to assess me?” he asks, more for her reaction than whatever lie she comes up with as an answer.

She raises an eyebrow, deflects by answering with a question of her own, “What makes you think that?”

He inclines his head, mirrors her perfectly relaxed expression, doesn’t ask her to cut the bullshit.

“You’re not the only one with hobbies, Barnes. People watching is so much more fun than bird watching.”

That, Bucky can almost believe. “Don’t tell Wilson. He might get offended.”

“Have you thought about where you want to live in New York?”

He has. Somewhere she doesn’t have access to. “Why? You offering to let me stay with you until I find something?”

“Not in a million years,” Romanoff says with a brilliant smile that makes him chuckle.

“I don’t know,” he says, answering her honesty with some of his own. “Haven’t stayed in one place for more than a few days for a long time.”

“There’s a safehouse you might use until you find something more permanent. If staying with Steve doesn’t work out.”

“I don’t need your charity.” It’s rude and he knows it. He doesn’t care.

“Really?” she says, glancing around the cabin. “How were you planning on getting to New York, then?”

“The long way. I’ve managed fine on my own these past few months.” Getting back into the States without any help isn’t a problem, he can do that in a day or two on his own. The biggest obstacle for that solution is that Bucky would have to tell Steve that he trusts Romanoff, Steve’s good friend, about as far as he can throw her.

“Well. Steve tracked you down. I’m not sure I would classify that as doing fine.”

He refuses to rise to the bait. Keeps the smirk off his face. “He knows me better than most. Bound to happen.”

Romanoff doesn’t call him a liar, though she sees right through the lie as he knew she would. She looks at him in silence, her eyes dipping down to his fingers when they twitch as the plane hits another air pocket, the deep breaths he takes to keep calm. A minute passes, two, then three. He’s not going to fill the silence, uncomfortable as it is. It’s an old technique and Bucky has used it before to get info out of the easily rattled. He isn’t falling for it himself. He keeps his eyes on hers, pretends not to notice the way she tenses in response to his twitch.

She shakes her head minutely, gets up, and says, “If Fury has decided you’re safe enough to run around free, then who am I to judge?” That surprises him and she must have seen the disbelief on his face because she pauses to add, “Don’t trust everything you read. A lot of that information is already outdated.”

He stares at her retreating back, wonders what she means. Does she think he’s still with Hydra, relying on their intel? It seems unlikely, she wouldn’t have let him anywhere near Steve if that was the case. Would probably have hunted him down herself.

It hits him, all of a sudden, that she means the files she leaked when they took down SHIELD. Bucky downloaded most of it, as did almost everybody else with an internet connection. He had only given it a cursory glance back then. Never got around to dig through it as memories of Steve had made him feel dirty reading up on his friends and coworkers. Had only gone through his own files, one for each life, and reading that ended with him puking up his guts. He had almost deleted all of it after. Maybe it’s time to give it another go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The outline for this fic consists of 9 chapters, so I kinda meant it when I tagged this with slow burn ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha talks with different people and Bucky continues to be an old grump.

The change in Natasha’s schedule to fly wayward soldiers back home means Maria Hill is out of town and the planned debrief of the Milan op will have to wait. It’s less than ideal, but it’s nothing new. No SHIELD means fewer rules to live by, which in turn means more flexibility. And Natasha has always been very flexible.

She decides to call in on Pepper Potts on her second day back.

They have an odd sort of relationship. Partly because it started with Natasha spying on Pepper’s then boss and now boyfriend. And partly because they are nothing alike. A decade ago Natasha might have initiated the relationship for the benefits there are to being friends with the CEO of Stark Industries. These days she maintains it mostly because she enjoys the time they spend together. Pepper is sharp as a knife and has somehow remained good-natured and cheerful while juggling a stress-filled job that never gives her any time off and that she has been accused of getting by sleeping with the former CEO.

She is also looking for a new PA for the second time in a year when Natasha visits her.

“You seem to be going through your assistants at an alarming rate, Ms. Potts,” she says, low and dry, as a greeting.

“Oh, you have no idea.” Pepper brushes back her already impeccable hair and sighs, gestures at the holographic images, collapsing them down onto the blank surface of her desk.

They walk over to the group of soft chairs in the far corner of the office, Pepper’s high heels clicking with every step. The plush leather chairs there provide a less formal seating arrangement than by the desk. Natasha sits with her back to the wall, and Pepper outlined by the city behind her.

“Did I tell you that Kevin was trying to siphon out Stark Tech secrets to sell them to the highest bidder? Because he was. He would have gotten away with company secrets if not for JARVIS.” She sighs, waves a hand to indicate the entire room. “This job is hard enough as it is, I don’t want to waste my time wondering if I can trust my employees.” The iron core that carried her through years of being Tony Stark’s PA in every definition of the job and a few beyond that, shows in the way she sets her jaw. There are people who believe that Pepper Potts is the softer option to Stark after he stepped down as CEO. They are completely and utterly wrong.

“Do you want me to sit in on the interviews? I might spot something your HR department would otherwise miss.” Favors are a currency for spies everywhere. Back when Natasha switched sides to SHIELD, she found it hard to turn down requests from the very few people she trusted, near impossible to not count favors earned or owed. These days it almost comes naturally to her. At least with the handful of people she considers friends.

Pepper’s eyes are big and filled with hope for a moment, then she puts on a mock frown. “Don’t scare them, okay?”

“I promise I won’t do anything that will reflect badly on Stark Industries,” Natasha says, her face carefully blank, and holds up three fingers with her thumb holding down her little finger. “Scout’s honor.”

Pepper’s returning smile is wry as she leans back in her chair. “You know, I used to have the best assistant, but she left for another job. Couldn’t even tempt her back when the company she left me for went up in literal flames.”

Natasha tilts her head, as if considering how to solve that problem, frowns a little. “Have you looked her up on LinkedIn? Maybe if you send her an invite, she’ll reconsider your offer.”

Pepper clears her throat to cover up for the undignified giggle that escapes her and says, “You really were my favorite. I particularly appreciated how you dealt with Justin Hammer.”

It had been fun pretending to be normal for a while. Natalie Rushman had been soft and approachable, professional and trusted. Natalie Rushman didn’t wake up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart and sweat on her brow. Natalie Rushman did her job and didn’t think twice about it. “You’re just going to gloss over the part where I made your boyfriend blow up his house?”

“Oh, that’s just Tony for you,” she says with a dismissive wave. “He does that pretty much every other week.”

And there it is. One of the many reasons why she likes Pepper so much. When Natasha had worked for Stark Industries, her goal had been to asses Stark, to find his weak spots and push them as hard as she could to see if he imploded or stood his ground. But none of that matters to Pepper. To her, the red in Natasha’s ledger is already paid in full. It’s rare and priceless and by the end of her visit, she has talked Pepper into taking Natasha up on her offer.

 

Her visit afterward to Steve goes less smoothly since Barnes acts like a mopey teenager. He apparently sees her offer to help him find somewhere to live as an insult instead of what it is: A way for her to make sure that if he blows up or Hydra finds him, the number of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire will be kept to a minimum. It’s not like finding out where he decides to live will be a problem. All she has to do is follow Steve for a few hours. But fine, he can go sulk in a corner if that’s what he wants to do.

 

“Imagine my surprise when I found out Steve has a new lodger,” Maria says, subtle as ever, after they have gone over from the Milan op a few days later. “Or old, depending on how you look at it.”

“Ah, you see, I don’t have to imagine.” Natasha gets up, collects a wine bottle and a couple of glasses from her kitchen.

Maria takes the offered glass but doesn’t let it distract her, keeps her eyes focused on Natasha. “He did mention you had been by more often than usual.”

“Someone has to keep an eye on Barnes.” There aren’t a lot of other options. Clint is stuck in Afghanistan and Sharon spends much of her time overseas these days. At least Sam has been quietly assessing him, too. One of these days she’ll ask him what he sees when he looks at the man that used to be Bucky Barnes.

Maria smiles at that. It’s not a regular occurrence. “Some people might decide to go easier on the person standing where they once stood.”

The observation isn’t surprising. Not the parallel, not the quiet amusement. What’s surprising is that Maria is the first one to point out the glaringly, painfully obvious similarities between her and Barnes – up to and including the way they were both hunted down by blond idiots who should have a little less faith in former Soviet assassins. Clint would have had a field day with this if he wasn’t still pissed at her for not calling him when SHIELD went up in flames. “They might,” Natasha agrees. “Have you met him, yet? Barnes, I mean.”

“Not for long enough to make any kind of judgment.”

“Okay. Initial impression then?”

“Skittish and on edge. He was tapping a finger against his leg entire time I was there.” She gestures with her glass. “Easy to tell that he and Steve grew up together.”

“What do you mean?”

“He called me ‘ma’am’.” Amusement tints her voice, softens the lines of her face. That’s twice in as many minutes. Interesting.

It’s also good news. The kind Natasha has been hoping for but not expecting. Barnes might still be a person under all those scars and open wounds. “Speaking of: Do you know what Fury’s plan is?”

“Why ‘speaking of’? Do you think he’s involved in Steve’s little rehabilitation project?” It’s an evasion, not even a good one. They might be friends, but Maria’s loyalty lies with Fury. Sometimes, this turns their conversations into a sparring session.

“You mean: Do I think Steve could track down the Winter Soldier on his own when most intelligence agencies couldn’t even prove he was a real person? Yes, I’m sure Fury is involved.” What she hasn’t figured out yet is why. What Fury’s goal is other than having Captain America back in his stable. Recruiting the Winter Soldier is a high-risk play in the current political climate.

Maria inclines her head. “Good point. But, no, I don’t know. I have my suspicions, but he hasn’t involved me yet. Why? Do you need extra resources?”

What she needs to keep track of someone as skilled and paranoid as Barnes, is a rota of five to ten agents that are switched out every month or so. Bugs that the scanners Barnes has got his hands on won’t detect. She saw the smudged handprint on the tiles near the ceiling in Steve’s bathroom, she knows he has been over the apartment with a fine-toothed comb. That’s the easy answer to Maria’s question. The only problem is if Natasha follows through with any of that, it will send Barnes running so hard and so fast it will take her years to find him if she finds him at all. And she will have to live with having broken Steve Grant Rogers’ heart. “Having Clint around would be helpful,” she says instead.

“You want to bring Barton into this?”

“It might be easier for Barnes to trust him than me.” The obvious parallel between her and Barnes has turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to making him trust her. He was chewed up by the same machine that made her, and he knows what kind of person comes out of the other end of it. He isn’t fooled by quips and easy smiles like most people are.

“He’s still dealing with that mess in Afghanistan, but I can pull him back home when he’s done if you need him.” She sounds doubtful.

“I do.”

“Consider it done.”

“Thank you. Could you keep me updated on how Barnes acts when he’s not busy boring holes into the back of my skull with his eyes?”

Maria doesn’t lecture her about Barnes’ right to privacy. Maria Hill is a professional. What she says is, “Of course.”

 

* * *

 

New York is both the same and very different as when he left. It makes Bucky uneasy. Like looking at a blurry image, a tv channel with the signal cutting out every time he blinks. Except it’s all around him and the constant assault of sounds, smells, and sights puts him on edge.

Steve is helping, if only marginally. He’s a calming presence, familiar in a way he shouldn’t be because of how much he’s changed, inside and out. But the core of him is still the same little runt with the too-big heart who doesn’t know when to call it quits.

It’s a small comfort he’s no longer living in DC, though. Staying in the apartment Bucky had cased and then shot Steve’s old boss in wouldn’t have been comfortable. Staying as a guest in the new place isn’t much of an upgrade. The apartment is ridiculously unsafe. There are too many windows, a balcony that sits too close to its neighbors and can be scaled without equipment, and a fire-escape by a kitchen window that anyone with half a brain can open from the outside.

Bucky doesn’t tell any of this to Steve. Doesn’t suggest that he buys locks for the windows, because anyone stupid enough to take on Captain America isn’t going to be stopped by locks. He does, however, comment on the décor. He can’t not comment on it. It has an actual TV den with a TV that covers half of the end wall, and it lacks the Steve-ness that had permeated the oversized closet of a studio apartment Steve had called home before the war. There’s a few drawings, books, and other details that scream Steve, but the rest looks like it could be from a catalog for the rich and famous.

“What did you do, buy this place furnished?”

“Well,” Steve says. Puts his hands on his hips.

“You did, didn’t you?” He grins.

“Tony got it for me when I mentioned moving back to New York. Thought it would be rude to turn him down.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“It’s a nice place.”

“Yeah, nice. That’s exactly how I would have put it. Nice.” They stocked the fridge earlier with enough food for two hungry super soldiers. Fresh produce in all the colors of the rainbow, several types of bread because Bucky likes having options now that he doesn’t have to relocate every other day, and meat enough to feed a family or two for a week. Even with all that, there’s still room left over in it.

“Shut up.”

Bucky smooths his features, walks over to him to put a hand on his shoulder, and says, “You did good, kid. I’m proud of you.”

For a second Steve stares in disbelief, then he dislodges the hand on his shoulder with a flick of his wrist, and walks away, shaking his head.

Bucky laughs, doesn’t stop until Steve begins banging the cupboards in the kitchen, preparing dinner.

 

“Have you thought about Natasha’s offer?” Steve asks one day over dinner. The question sounds innocent when put like that. What he is really asking is if Bucky will let the Black Widow turn an entire apartment into a giant petri dish where she can watch him squirm. Every hour of every day.

“I’d rather eat broken glass,” Bucky says cheerfully and shovels more lasagna into his mouth.

Steve’s face crumples. He lays his fork down next to the plate. The words caught in his throat are practically visible from the outside, vibrating it with their insistence.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” He lets out a deep sigh, puts his own fork down, and places his hands flat on the table, fingers splayed, focuses on the texture of the wood under his right. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just. She’s a spy. You can’t trust spies. I should know, I used to be one.”

“Buck.” There’s pleading in his voice and it sounds exactly like Ma Rogers telling her son not to get in trouble. “I know she’s not easy to trust, but you can. I trust her with my life.”

It’s a sucker-punch and Bucky is a fool for letting it hit home. “Like you trusted Fury? The guy who bugged your home and installed a spy as your neighbor?”

“Actually, no. I’ve never trusted Fury. Not the way I trust Nat,” Steve says, and damn the man for that tired smile.

“You’re not me. She has no reason to trust me.” In fact, she has every reason not to. And not just because of the bullets he put in her.

“Bucky.”

“Steve.” It’s a no-win fight. He’s an immovable object against an unstoppable force. Or near immovable. Years of disuse has weakened his defense against the most stubborn idiot he has ever met. “Gimme a few weeks to see if I can find something, then you can call her.”

Steve smiles and Bucky rolls his eyes. They both let the subject go for the time being.

Bucky spends the next week looking at apartments. It’s not as easy a task as he had thought. Either they are too close to the ground, in indefensible buildings, or made of cardboard, every step the neighbors take audible through the walls. It’s a big city, he should be able to find something even if he has to rely on alternatives to the word-of-mouth he used when he turned eighteen.

Back before the war, he had a solid network of friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. He was well-liked. Now he has Steve, and maybe Sam, even if the two snark at each other more than they talk. If he stretches the definition of acquaintances, there a couple of guys he’s talked with at the VA. None of whom with which he is comfortable or desperate enough to ask for any favors. He has started buying his coffee at a different place every time after a barista nodded at him in recognition, for crying out loud. And it’s not that he minds being alone. Some days being alone is all that keeps him afloat. Being cut off is a whole different matter. No man is an island and all that crap. Well, he feels like one. He’s a sail cut loose and flapping in the wind.

If it was only a matter of finding somewhere to lay low, he’d find it in no time. He has done so more times than he can count after he reclaimed his freedom. But it has to be somewhere he’ll tolerate staying for months, a year minimum. He sees the way Steve looks at him, knows how much he worries. If he starts apartment hopping, Steve will see that as a bad sign and worry even more. Bucky has enough to deal with, he can’t deal with that on top of everything else. He needs a place where he can be alone when he needs to. A place where he doesn’t have to face Steve’s worried mug in the morning after a night of waking up with a scream lodged in his throat.

He finds it just as he’s about to give in and ask Steve to let Romanoff know he’s accepting her offer. It’s in the kind of neighborhood his mother dreamed about when he was a snot-nosed kid. There’s a bakery on the corner, the streets are relatively clean, and no one’s lurking in dark corners for some easy prey to come along at night. None of that plays any part in his choice, though it makes him smile when Steve says so.

What makes him pick it is the fireproof door, the solid and lockable windows, and the fire escape on the front of the building. If anyone wants in, they will have to be obvious about it.

 

Steve tells Romanoff about it the next time she shows up to check if Bucky has snapped yet.

“Nice,” she says and shifts her attention from Steve on the couch next to her to Bucky standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “Does it come with a moat? Or underground bunker?”

If he was feeling hospitable, he might have joined them. There’s a cup on the coffee table waiting for him and the donuts Romanoff brought with her. He remains where he is. “GAU-19’s mounted by the windows and trained attack dogs.” He avoids looking at Steve as he says it. Doesn’t want to face the slight lip press and drooping shoulders. He is speaking with her instead of shutting the door in her face as he wants to. Why can’t that be enough?

“I think I need a better realtor. My place only came with a bad wi-fi connection and a washer-dryer that crapped out on me after one month. You all set to move in?”

Steve trusts her, he reminds himself. He has gone over Steve’s apartment with a radio frequency detector he built himself and some high-end scanners he ordered off the internet. Several times. Not once has he found anything other than false positives. He has no reason to think that she’ll bug his place other than it’s what he would do if the situation was reversed. “All set,” he says with a tight grin that feels like a grimace.

She shrugs and to Bucky’s amazement doesn’t pressure him any further.

As Romanoff about to leave, she turns to Steve and says, “Hang on, can I borrow your phone?”

“Why?”

“To set up a Tinder profile. Obviously.”

Steve digs it out of his pocket, unlocks it, and hands it over with a look of amusement.

She taps it a few times, says “See? No harm done,” showing the screen to Steve as Bucky’s phone buzzes, turns her unnerving gaze back to him and continues, “Now you can call me yourself if you decide the new place needs a woman’s touch after all.”

The text sent from Steve’s phone contains a phone number. Unlisted, when he checks it. He doesn’t call it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This chapter was really low on BuckyNat interactions, but bear with me, the next one will have more.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha gets a new mission, talks with a few people about it, and Bucky does something she had really not seen coming.

The next mission brief Maria hands her is so simple that Natasha goes over it twice to make sure she’s not missing something. It’s a three-step operation: Get on-site access to a few computers at a Columbus-based social media consulting firm suspected of being a front for a Hydra propaganda machine, place bugs on said computers, and get back out again. There is nothing in the brief that explains why they want to send the Black Widow of fame and infamy to do a rookie’s job. Hell, there’s no reason why someone else couldn’t just dump a bunch of USB flash drives with preloaded exploits in the employee parking lot instead. There is always someone curious enough to plug an unknown USB into their computer to see what is on it. Less contact, less risk of being caught.

Closing the folder and looking over at Maria, Natasha says, “What aren’t you telling me?”

Maria leans back into her chair, meeting her gaze straight on. To her credit, there’s a flash of regret before she answers, “You’re not going alone. Barnes needs field testing to prove his readiness.”

Right. This is what she gets for sticking her nose in Fury’s business without being explicitly asked to do so. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Or in her case, keep an eye on the ex-Hydra assassin and become his brand-new babysitter.

A year ago, Natasha could have named a handful of SHIELD agents that she would have been comfortable with sending on a mission with the Winter Soldier instead of herself. Now there is Sharon if she could be persuaded to take time off from CIA to do a stint of babysitting. Or Clint if he wasn’t still in Afghanistan. “Fine,” she says eventually. “Tell Fury to bring a giant box of chocolates when he’s in town.”

 

The next step requires a more delicate touch. Especially since Barnes is no longer living with Steve. She can’t just pop in because she’s not supposed to know where he lives now, and his trust issues have trust issues. What she can do is to visit the gym since she’s already at Avengers Tower and Steve usually works out around this time. If she’s lucky, he might bring Barnes along. Even if he doesn’t, she still gets a workout out of it.

After stretching, Natasha goes straight to the heavy bags in the far corner of the gym. Her brain has always worked better when her body is busy doing something else. The simple act of putting on her hand and foot wraps lends her a focus that she usually only has while working. The steady rhythm of punches and kicks allows her mind to flow free.

As annoyed as she is with Fury dropping this mess in her lap without a warning, part of her is looking forward to observing Barnes in the field. Working with him might prove interesting in the long term. Once he removes that four-foot stick up his ass, that is. She has seen the physical side to his abilities. Has scars to prove just how dangerous he can be. As for his mental capabilities, she only has Steve to go on and as observant he can be, he also has a giant blind spot when it comes to Barnes. It’s not entirely impossible that Steve had been downplaying his own accomplishments to boost those of his once long-lost and now very much alive childhood friend.

Having to plan out the op with Barnes will give her some insight into his strategic thinking, as will seeing how quickly he figures out what a sham this op is. And that’s just the planning stage. Out in the field, he’ll have to behave and think on his feet if something goes wrong, and that will give her an idea of how good of an actor he is. So far, all he’s allowed her to see is the moody teenager façade he puts up whenever she’s around. The closest he comes to appearing human is his jumpiness whenever he’s startled. It is what makes his behavior believable and human-like, instead of an act to evade suspicion. No one’s that good of an actor, not round the clock. If he were, he’d have picked an act that allowed him more freedom since sulking in the corner tended to draw attention, not escape it.

Besides, he’s been in New York for three weeks now; if his plan really is to cut Steve’s throat, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it.

Natasha suppresses the grin pulling at the corner of her mouth and steadies the heavy bag before she removes her wraps. Her muscles are warm and heavy from use and she spends a while longer than usual to stretch. When she looks up again, she sees Steve and Barnes enter the gym. Good things _do_ come to those who wait. At least sometimes.

Steve stops to talk with someone, while Barnes makes a beeline for the heavy bags. He doesn’t notice she’s already there until she stands and nods at him, then he freezes.

She holds up her hands, the wraps trailing from them. “Don’t worry, I come in peace,” she says drily.

He starts to wrap his own hands instead of answering her. Metal and flesh both get the same treatment.

When she gets closer it becomes obvious that the shadows under his eyes are bruise-like dark circles, blue and puffy looking. So, he has sleepless nights, too. That’s another tick in the ‘damaged human being, not brainwashed assassin’ column. She pretends not to notice; certain he isn’t interested in her pity or sympathy. “Fury has a job for you,” Natasha says once she’s close enough to speak without other people hearing her.

He doesn’t look away from the heavy bag. Starts working on it. “Have him send me the details and I’ll take a look at it.”

“It’s not a solo job. We’re both going.”

Barnes’ next punch sends the heavy bag swinging. “He can send someone else, then.”

She steadies the bag, then steps out of his way again. “I know you won’t believe me, but if that was an option, I wouldn’t be standing here right now,” she says it drily again, to let him think it’s a joke.

Seconds ticks by. His face shows nothing but grim determination. Whatever he’s thinking about isn’t visible through the mask he slipped on when she approached. Then he says, “Okay.”

“Great, I have a copy of the files in my bag, we can go over it together once you’ve had a look.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where do we go over it?” His upper lip twitches when he says ‘we.’ It looks a lot like a sneer.

“Wherever you’d like.” Diplomacy is a skill Natasha has mastered a long time ago. It comes in handy when she’s forced to deal with stubborn assholes.

He looks over her shoulder, says, “Steve’s place is neutral grounds. We can meet there.”

“That’s right. Don’t bother with asking me first,” comes Steve’s voice behind her.

She turns, and rolls her eyes at him, about to say something when Barnes says, “Cry me a fucking river.”

Steve looks from Barnes to her and back again, mutters, “Unbelievable,” throws Barnes a water bottle instead of handing it to him and walks away.

 

The next day, Natasha presses the button next to the strip of white paper saying ‘S. G. Rogers’. A buzz announcing the lock disengaging is all the welcome she gets. Barnes is just as nonverbal when he opens the apartment door before she can knock.

He leaves her dangling for a few seconds before he steps aside and gestures for her to enter. He smells of soap when she moves past him, so at least he’s keeping clean. Maybe the perma-stubble and disheveled hair are a fashion statement. He looked quite sharp in all the pictures of him from back in the 40s; he might be going for hipster chic in this century. She wipes the grin off her face before he has a chance to catch her with it.

The apartment is as silent as he is. Steve’s tan leather jacket is missing from the hallway and there’s an empty spot on his shoe rack. It’s kind of a relief. Her and Barnes circling each other like overgrown cats is awkward enough without Steve hovering nearby.

He leads her to the dining table where he has laid out the files that she gave him, along with a paper map. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but still a good sign he’s taking it seriously despite the simplicity of the mission.

“Eager to get started, huh?”

“Eager to be done,” he says and makes himself out to be a liar when he leaves her there to go to the kitchen.

On the seat of one of the chairs, almost out of sight, is a manila envelope with a few sheets of sturdy paper on top. Barnes is still moving things around in the kitchen, so she pulls the chair out to get a look. The topmost sheet has a pencil drawing of a woman standing in a kitchen with her back turned stirring a pot. She is wearing an apron tied around her waist, her hair in curlers. Natasha can almost smell the food cooking on the old-fashioned stove. It looks intimate, slice-of-life, the way a lot of Steve’s drawings are. The second drawing in the stack has a young girl looking at the viewer. The corners of her mouth curl in an impish smile, she has dark hair and wide-set, pale eyes. It doesn’t take a genius to see the resemblance.

Natasha rearranges the sheets like she found them, pushes the chair back, and pretends to be studying the map when Barnes returns from the kitchen with two cups and a coffee press. There was a time when snooping in other people’s private business meant nothing to her. She really should spend less time around boy scouts like Captain America. Morality is a dangerous disease for a spy to catch.

He arranges the cups and coffee press at the end of the table. Pours her a cup before he pours some for himself. It’s sort of adorable. He has the same sense of polite hospitality that Steve does. Except with Barnes, it’s in stark contrast to the rest of him.

They go over the op and Barnes somehow manages to not question the op till she’s getting ready to leave. Then he asks, “How come Fury want us for a job that could be solved by sending a damn email to someone stupid enough to open attachments from unknown sources?”

If he didn’t read everything she did as a personal offense, Natasha might have smiled at that. Not only he is questioning the legitimacy of the op, but he’s offering up an alternative solution. Five points to Slytherin. “Baby steps, Barnes. You need to prove you can walk before he’s letting you run.”

“Right.” He sets his jaw like this is just the latest bump on the road they call life. And maybe it is. Maybe he’s as fed up with this joke of an op as she is.

In another life they might even have a few beers together, bitched about Fury. They could even start a club for former Soviet assassins. In this life, she says, “Do you want me to pick you up here before the op?”

“You know where I live. You can pick me up there.”

There’s no point in denying it. She’s vaguely curious if he spotted her driving by in a rented car, or if it’s just a good guess. She nods. Takes the opening for what it is. “Alright,” she says. “See you then.”

There’s only one more thing she needs to get done before she’s ready to go on a mission with Barnes.

 

Sam is wrapping up a group session at the VA when she catches up with him. He has invited her to join in on the sessions before, but the looks the vets shoot her while they file out only proves Natasha’s point. It doesn’t matter that she has fought in as many battles as most of them, she is famous for being a spy, not for her fighting skills. They see her as an interloper and that’s fine. She never much liked sharing her feelings with the class.

Sam stops halfway to the door when he sees her, says, “Uh, oh. Here comes trouble,” and approaches her.

“I come bearing gifts,” she says and raises the cardboard tray with two cups of coffee. They are a payment of sorts, for his time and her prying. They are also a signal to Sam that she’s not here just to say hi.

“That just proves my point.” The mock frown lasts less than a second and he takes the cup when she offers it. “If you’re here to tell me the president’s Hydra, I don’t want to hear it. I voted for the guy.”

“He’s safe.” She inclines her head. “As far as I know.”

“What can I do you for? I know you’re not here to sign up for a group session.”

“You’ve got me there.” The room Sam held the session in is empty as is the hallway leading to it, but several doors are lining it and at least a touch of privacy would be nice for what she’s about to ask him. “Can we go outside? I’ve been cooped up inside all day.”

“There’s a park next door and a rest area with benches out back for volunteers slacking off.”

Natasha saw the park when she arrived, it is the opposite of private. Filled with people enjoying the sun and fresh air. “The benches will be fine.”

When they sit down outside, Sam says, “Not that I don’t appreciate the coffee, but why are you really here?”

“To ask you a favor.”

“Duh’,” Sam says and raises the cup. “I think I got that.”

Good, she meant him to. “I wanted to pick your brain about Barnes.”

“Why?”

Because Steve is too biased and Fury will never tell her if he thinks Barnes is a threat to her. He expects her to deal with it, instead. But mostly because Sam’s ability to see people for who they truly are rivals hers, except that he uses it to put people back together, while she is trained to use it to pull them apart. “I’m about to go on a job with him and I would like a second opinion before I go.”

“If Steve could see you now…” He says it in a teasing tone, but with a hint of worry in his eyes. Sam’s a friend, a good friend at that. But he has spent the last half year traveling on and off with Steve. His loyalty is understandable and valid considering what she’s asking.

“I’ve been pretty obvious about what I’m doing, and he knows about the job.”

He nods to concede to her point.

“So, what do you think?”

He shoots her a sideways glance that looks half tired and half amused. “I think he hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in years. Decades probably. I think that other than Steve, he doesn’t trust another living soul, and that includes himself. He carries the weight of every kill the Winter Soldier committed.” Sam pauses to let it sink in, looks at her and she nods. All that is to be expected. It comes having to relearn how to act like a human being instead of a weapon. “But for all that, he’s dealing with what he’s been through far better than most people would. Sure, he’s an ass, but there are worse ways to deal with trauma.”

“You mean more violent ways?”

He turns to fully face her on the bench, draws one leg up onto it while the other remains off the bench. “Do you know the percentage of vets who commits suicide?”

“I don’t,” Natasha admits, she only knows it’s high. “But I do know that Barnes would never do that. At least not on purpose.”

“You’re sure about that?”

Not a hundred percent, but close enough. “If he did that then the people who made him what he is, what he was, will have won. That’s why he smokes, but also why his stubble is always the same length and his nails are trimmed down and filed. It’s his body and he’s going to do with it as he damn pleases because now he can.” Sam hasn’t known her for long enough to know how often she changes her hair. Doesn’t seem to have noticed that she has stopped flat-ironing it and let some of her natural curls show instead. It’s a matter of control and power and not something that’s easy to understand unless you know what it is like to be entirely without it.

Sam swirls his cup, the coffee sloshes against the sides of it. “All that and you’re still here to bribe me with coffee.”

She leans forward, puts her hand on his, and says, sickly-sweet, “That’s because I appreciate your opinion.”

He laughs and shakes his head, says, “I’m sure you do,” with raised eyebrows. After he has sobered, he says, “If you want my advice, maybe a little less of _that_ around him. At least until you have convinced him you aren’t the enemy. Show him who you really are.”

Natasha nods. Who she really is, is someone with blood dripping off her hands and a mind that will analyze and categorize the people around her till the day she drops dead. Showing Barnes that person will send him running for the hills. She appreciates the advice, though. Shows of humanity, weakness, gains trust. It’s a tried and true tool for spies. Maybe she can meet it halfway by lowering some of her less important walls around Barnes. “Thanks,” she says with more conviction than she feels. “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

* * *

 

The elevator ride to the eleventh floor in the giant glass and concrete monstrosity that the suspected Hydra propaganda machine resides in feels a lot longer than it is. There are mirrors on either side of them and about half a billion reflections of himself and Romanoff fan out into the distance like they were a couple of particularly well-dressed guests in a funhouse. Bucky hates every second of it.

“Stop touching your neck. You’ll mess up your hair,” Romanoff says like she’s commenting on the weather.

He snatches his hand away. He has been so busy not staring at the mirrors he hasn’t noticed what his hand is doing. It’s inexcusable, especially while out on a mission. His cover wouldn’t fidget because of a new haircut. His cover wouldn’t fidget. Period. He’s supposed to be a salesman, suave and calm, not fidgety and self-conscious. He forces the tension down and stares ahead at the closed doors.

The elevator dings and the doors open to a foyer with a different reception desk than the one on their website and a receptionist dressed in what appears to be company uniform – blue blazer and white dress shirt. Romanoff approaches her with a spring to her step that sends her long blond wig bobbing up and down like a school girl’s on her way to prom and presents them in a light and airy tone that sounds nothing like her normal speaking voice. Everything about her is goddamn spunky, right down to the sky-blue fitted dress she’s wearing. It has even managed to quiet the little voice yelling _danger, danger_ at him whenever he’s near her. Despite his better judgment, Bucky is impressed.

Then he realizes the new reception desk means they have to change their plans.

Romanoff is supposed to chat the receptionist up to distract her while Bucky bugs the computer. Except that the old reception desk was a rectangle with an iMac that was fully accessible from his side, and the new one is L-shaped with a black computer monitor partially visible. The pc connected to it is probably attached to the underside of the desk. If he wants to have a chance to place any bugs, he needs to get behind the desk and maybe even under it. Which would be a lot easier if the receptionist didn’t keep shooting glances at him.

To give Romanoff enough time to distract her fully, Bucky removes himself from the equation by walking over to the water cooler in the corner. He takes his time. When he turns back, he finds the receptionist still looking at him. Oh, well, here goes nothing. He raises his plastic cup, inclines his head, and asks, “You want one, too?”

To his great luck, this earns him a small smirk from the receptionist before she says, “I’m good, thank you.”

He ignores the narrow-eyed glare Romanoff shoots him, saunters back, and leans against the far end of the reception desk with his good arm. “Can’t blame a man for trying.”

The receptionist turns halfway away from Romanoff, but the smirk lingers, warms a little.

Once upon a time, in another lifetime, Bucky could flirt his way into or out of anything. He doesn’t really remember when he started doing it, just that around the time he started taking notice of the girls in his class, he realized that some of them would blush when he smiled at them. Like _really_ blush. From under their pretty dresses right up to the hairline. To his teenage mind, that had been a victory of sorts. As the oldest kid of four, he was expected to be the man of the house when his dad was out and he was expected to look out for his kid sisters. He was never given anything except responsibilities. So, he leaned into this new opportunity. Perfected how to balance warmth and mischievousness. What to say and how to say it to get the right response.

All that was decades ago, though. Those finely-honed skills have long since rusted from disuse. But he’ll be damned if he’s gonna let office redecoration spoil their plans. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name,” he says laying it on thick, like he has a secret he’s dying to tell.

Her smile turns knowing. “That’s because I didn’t give it to you.” She pauses, then continues, “It’s Charlotte.”

He straightens, extends his hand to her and says, “Nice to meet you, Charlotte. I’m Benjamin.”

There’s no deliberation this time, Charlotte steps away from her spot by the computer to take his hand.

Romanoff remains motionless for a full second before she finally realizes what he’s doing and slips behind the desk to bug the computer.

Several long minutes after, when Bucky is about to run out of small talk subjects, Mr. Important rings Charlotte to let her know he’s ready to see them. Only strict self-control keeps him from sighing with relief.

“Two of you,” Mr. Self-Important says when they enter his office, not getting up from his giant desk to greet them. “You’re not going to gang up on me, are you?” He is a big earner for the company, and it shows in his manner and in his surroundings. His desk is a giant mahogany rectangle and the two glass-covered external walls make for an impressive backdrop to it.

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” Romanoff says in the same vapid tone she used earlier. “He’s my trainee. Here to watch and learn.”

It takes her moments to persuade Mr. Self-Important to come away from his desk to look at the city below. It takes Bucky even less time to slip the bug from his pocket, insert it into Mr. Self-Important’s computer, and pocket it again when it blinks green once.

Time drags from then. With the goal of the op accomplished Bucky just wants out but leaving abruptly will look suspicious and he does his best not to stare at the countless potential sniper’s nest surrounding them while Romanoff works her pitch. When did acting normal become this hard? Somewhere between seeing one of the guys from his squad being gutted by a Nazi soldier and earlier this year when he tried to beat the life out of Steve onboard a crashing helicarrier, probably.

It drains even more of his remaining energy to stop and say goodbye the receptionist when they leave.

Once they are outside, Romanoff says, “Well, that was one way of gaining access to a computer,” amusement dripping off her words.

Two blocks to reach the car park they left their car in, then an hour’s drive to the Quinjet that will take them from Columbus to New York. Three hours total till he’s back home and can lock the door behind him. He can do this. He’s been through worse. “So? It worked, didn’t it,” Bucky says without any of the rancor clawing at his throat.

“I mean, full marks for initiative and creativity. I just hadn’t expected to watch the Winter Soldier flirt when I woke up this morning.”

This is the price he has to pay. If he wants a chance at a new life, one not spent on the run, he has to work for it. And he wants this, he wants to feel useful again. “Make sure to mention that in your report to Fury, then.”

She’s quiet until they reach the car park, then she half turns her head towards him without looking up, says, “You did good, Barnes. But your life will get a lot easier if you stop treating everything like a test you’re going to fail.”

It’s unexpected. He’s expecting another joke, not whatever that odd Life Pro Tip was. “This isn’t the kind of work I’d have thought Fury would put me to,” he says to cover up his confusion.

“Then what is?” Romanoff turns her full attention on him, and he refuses to flinch from it.

He opens the car door, stands in it, and turns to face her fully. “Something with a lot more violence.”

“Is that what you want?”

He could tell her yes. It would even be partly true. He’s good at it, at killing, tearing through people like so much wet tissue paper, and there is a kind of satisfaction in doing something he is truly good at. But it’s not all that he wants. He has spent decades as a mindless weapon, a gun to be pointed at someone and fired at someone else’s will. He wants more than that, wants to _be_ more than that, but Bucky’s not naïve enough to believe that what he wants has any kind of impact on Fury’s plans. “Does that really matter?”

She gives him a funny look he can’t read, brow furrowed but with a twitch in the corner of her mouth. She slips out of sight before he can get a better read on her, gets into the car, and closes the door after her.

He gets into the passenger seat, takes off his gloves and tries not to fidget with them.

They are out of the car park before Romanoff says, “I’m not Steve, so I’m not going to give you a rousing speech. If Fury has given you a second chance and you decide to blow it, he’s not going to turn you in because of it. You’ll definitely be off the Christmas cards list, but he won’t send agents to drag you off to supervillain prison.”

Bucky doesn’t know how to respond to this kind of honesty. He’s not used to it coming from anyone but Steve. Life would be so much easier if he could get his hands on a cheat-sheet. To life in general and to confusing spies that he can’t seem to pin down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To my great disappointment this fic has yet to pass the Bechdel test. I know that Bucky honeypot-ing a mission doesn’t make up for this, but hey, it was worth a try.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha has coffee and fast-food with friends, and Bucky has A Bad Day.

There are behaviors so ingrained in her that Natasha doesn’t even think about doing them anymore. Like looking at reflective surfaces to see what goes on behind her or memorizing license plates. They are useful habits and so hardwired into her that they barely demand any conscious effort. Her heart doesn’t need prompting to pump blood around her body, neither do her eyes to keep track of potential tails. They’re also what draws her attention to the van parked outside her building before she reaches it. The van isn’t odd in itself. The white paint job is younger than the car and the sticker with air bubbles trapped under it even more so. Nothing about it sticks out, not even the generic company name printed on the sticker. Springtime Cleaning is as good a name as any for a cleaning company.

She punches in the code for the door to her building with an itch between her shoulder blades, buys herself time by checking her mailbox which contains only a few flyers and a postcard she pockets. She has only stayed alive for this long by paying attention to details – details like a recently applied sticker on the car outside. So recently, there are still lines from the water that has been allowed to air dry underneath it. She digs out her phone. The company name is generic and bound to have been used by someone. The phone number, however, doesn’t match any company listing. Approach with caution it is.

Natasha takes the stairs to her floor and opens the door a crack to survey the landing before she approaches the door to her apartment. There’s a white rectangle tacked onto her door. When she gets closer it turns out to be a business card with one of Fury’s old aliases under the company name. Of course, it’s him. She should have guessed. She holsters her Glock, removes the business card, and unlocks the door. “You know, some people wait to be let in,” she says before the door is fully open.

“Some people have no sense of adventure.” Fury turns away from the bookcase he has been studying.

There is no doubt in Natasha’s mind he’s doing it on purpose. Entering her home when she’s out and looking so unconcerned about it. He knows how she has dealt with intruders in the past. And he knows that despite everything, he is one of the very few people who can pull this kind of stunt and get away with it.

“So, you got my message?” She shrugs out of her jacket but leaves her boots on and the Glock in the holster at the small of her back.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” He gestures at her dining table.

She takes a few steps into the living room to be able to see it and the matte black box sitting on top of it. Silver block letters spell out a brand she recognizes from lifestyle magazines for the rich and easily bored. Unless she’s mistaken, then the chocolate inside is dark, disgustingly bitter, and costs more than it has any right to. It’s an apology and a fuck-you all rolled up in one. Amusing, and very like him.

She’s all out of real coffee, but she makes two cups with the instant she has on reserve. Double the amount of coffee for him and sugar for her. On her way over to the living area, she picks up the box, slips the silver ribbon off, and leaves it open on the coffee table. She sits on one end of the sofa, leaving the other end of it and the two armchairs free for Fury.

Predictably, he picks the chair facing the window. Not so predictably, he grunts when he leans forward to take one of the near black squares of chocolate and pops it in his mouth. Aging isn’t something that happens to Nick Fury. In the years that Natasha has known him, he hasn’t grown older, only harder. “How was Milan?” he asks, a little gruffly.

“You’ve read the report. I haven’t been able to find any signs of it being a part of a network since. Looks like it was a single cell operation and we caught it before it could spread.”

“You made sure of that,” he says dryly. Like reducing an underground installation to a hole in the ground was nothing but an amusing anecdote in the story of her life.

“You didn’t see the work they had done. The experiments.”

He harrumphs in response. Neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

There was one detail Natasha left out of the report, one person rather, because she hadn’t been able to conclusively ID the body without a DNA test, and because it wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things. “Do you remember Sarto? Kat Sarto. Tall woman with short, dark hair. She was on the team that dealt with the mess in Richmond.”

Fury nods but keeps silent.

“Looks like she didn’t die in the Triskelion after all. Or she had a double working at that base.” What she doesn’t say is how angry that had made her. Angry and numb. It had been an ugly reminder of how much she had lost with SHIELD’s fall. Of the betrayal. “Well, she’s dead now.” Her smile is bitter, and she knows it. Doesn’t care enough to fake a more convincing one.

He doesn’t speak for a few long moments, then he says, “You couldn’t have known she was Hydra back then.” The look she shoots him is harder than she intends, and it earns her a raised eyebrow. Then he sighs and sinks deeper into the chair. “If I couldn’t see what was going on right under my own nose, then you sure as shit weren’t expected to either.”

Natasha doesn’t agree, but it’s nice of him to say so.

“I take it Columbus went well,” Fury says a little while later.

Right. She asked him to come and see her for more than just an apology shaped like a box of chocolates. “You know, you could have just asked me to assess Barnes from the beginning,” she says, because she’s not going to sit here and pretend he hasn’t read the report.

“I didn’t think I had to. Not with someone like him.”

Someone like her, he means. Someone with whom she ought to sympathize. But sympathizing with Barnes doesn’t mean trusting him or embracing him with open arms. Having been where he is now is one of the reasons why she keeps an eye on him. Granted, he hasn’t shown any signs of being the threat she had initially thought him to be, but she’s not about to let Fury know that. Not yet, anyway. She prefers to check and double-check before she draws her conclusions.

“Quite a welcome he’s gotten,” Natasha says instead. “I don’t remember having that much freedom when Clint convinced me to switch sides. Used to be more shrinks and armed guards, less coffee shop and walks in the park.”

“Oh, don’t give me that, Romanoff. You know damn well that you had just shot one of my best agents when he dragged your uncooperative ass into my office. Barnes had done nothing more exciting than grocery shopping and read shitty, second-hand paperbacks when I kept a watch on him.”

“Which books?” she asks, not expecting a straight answer.

“You don’t expect me to do your homework for you, too, do you?” Bone dry as always.

“It would be a nice change of pace.”

Fury leans forward, takes another piece of chocolate, and pops it into his mouth while keeping his eyes locked on hers.

Infuriating, familiar, and amusing.

It almost feels like home and Natasha can’t help enjoying every second of it.

 

After Fury leaves, she pulls out the postcard she picked up earlier. It has a photo of the Empire State Building on the front with the text ‘Wish you were here’ in curly letters across it. There’s no post stamp or any text in the address field, but it has a crudely drawn arrow on the half where the message is supposed to go like the world’s laziest picture puzzle.

Clint picks up on the second ring and Natasha says as a greeting, “I’m not going touristing with you, I don’t care how long it’s been.”

“You’re no fun.” He sounds tired and he punctures the sentence with a barely suppressed yawn.

“I’m more fun than you can handle. When did you get back?”

“An hour ago. I think. My phone switched time zones automatically and I can never remember how much difference there is.” His phone and just about everyone else’s. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Mr. Barton.

“Have you eaten yet?”

“Not dinner, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Instead of asking what else she could mean at seven in the evening, Natasha says, “Come on over and I’ll order some Chinese,” grabs her laptop from the bookcase and flips it open on the kitchen counter.

Clint arrives just after the delivery boy drops off the food. There’s a lot of it, maybe more than the two of them can eat. Oh well, she’ll have leftovers for tomorrow, then.

They take it out on the balcony, cover the circular iron-wrought café table with boxes and boxes of steaming Chinese food. There’s almost no room left for the two bottles of watery Chinese beer she bought along with the food.

Clint barely speaks except to answer her questions between shoveling food into his mouth. His deep dislike for airplane food has left him starving yet again, apparently. Natasha leaves him to it, studies him instead. The deep tan highlights the crow’s feet around his eyes. Pale lines on bronze. At some point, he’s going to realize that she hasn’t aged as much as she should since they met. That the decade that has worn grooves into him has barely touched her. A better person would have told him that she was older than she looked when they became friends. But then a better person wouldn’t have as much blood on their hands as she.

Bringing it up now will only hurt him. Besides he knows her birthday is made up to have something to put in her official records, he just doesn’t know that it’s probably off by decades instead of months or a few years. Saying she doesn’t remember when her birthday is, makes people look at her funny, telling them what decade she suspects it to be will probably end with her being committed to a psych ward. Or if she’s unlucky, she’ll end up in some lab where they’ll carbon date her and maybe try to extract whatever it is in her blood that makes her look nearly half her real age. If her own estimate has any truth to it, that is. It’s hard to tell. No one’s memories are linear, least of all hers. It comes with having them tampered with so much.

She has checked KGB’s records and those of the Red Room’s she could get her hands on. Found three different birthdates for her troubles. Spread over two decades. So, it seems her guess is as good as anyone else’s. Anyway, now isn’t the time for revealing deep and harrowing secrets that will end up raising more questions than she has answers for.

When they are done eating, Natasha surveys the empty or near-empty boxes. Maybe she shouldn’t have had that second helping of Kung Pao. Being this full isn’t comfortable.

Clint begins to stack the empty boxes, moving the rest around. “Where’s the fortune cookies?”

“Why?”

“Heathen. It’s the best part of the meal.” He finds them in the plastic bags everything came in, pumps one arm into the air in triumph. Him and his superstitions, they always get worse when he spends time in the field.

Natasha gets up and starts to collect the boxes. Closing the ones with enough left to save and putting the empty ones in the bag to throw them out. “Yeah, you can keep mine.”

He follows her inside with the now filled bag in one hand and a fortune cookie in the other. “I’ll do mine first, you’ll have to wait for yours.” He cracks the first one open, dumps the dry cookie and the bag in the trash can, and opens the fortune. “Don’t pursue happiness – create it,” he reads and nods with an overly somber expression.

“So glad we solved that mystery,” she says, stacks the boxes with leftovers on a shelf in the fridge and takes a bottle of white wine out, follows it with a couple of glasses from a cupboard, and gestures him back out on the balcony.

Once they are seated outside again, Clint starts a drumroll with two fingers on the side of the table. “Excited for yours yet?” He pulls a face at her rolling her eyes, cracks the cookie open, leaving the crumbs on the table, and smirks as he reads the fortune. “‘Tasha, honey, I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says, going down on one knee in front of her with the fortune held up in front of him like a ring.

Natasha snatches it from him to make him stop acting like an idiot, turns the fortune over, and reads, _The love of your life is right in front of your eyes_. Her disdain becomes a snigger before she’s done reading.

With just a hint of offense, he says, “It’s not _that_ funny.” But that only makes her laugh harder.

It feels good to laugh. She’s been on task for months. Has barely taken any time to just relax since SHIELD fell. There has been too much to do, agents with burned covers to extract, Hydra infestations to root out. Then, on top of everything, Steve decided to bring his old friend in from the cold.

“Did Maria brief you?” she asks when she's done laughing.

“Nothing except you needing me for backup backup. Didn’t tell me what job it was for.”

Natasha picks her words carefully. Calling Barnes by his codename doesn’t seem fair anymore. More’s the pity. “Steve located Bucky and brought him back to New York.”

“Right,” Clint says and leans back, resting against the sun warm bricks behind them. “What’s the plan?”

It’s not what it was a month ago or even what it was two weeks ago. Especially not after having seen Barnes in action and how exhausted he had been on their trip back. There’s a better use of the solidarity Clint can provide the former sniper. Clint can be a stabilizing agent instead of another observer. “Steve is hosting a dinner party this Friday,” Natasha says. “I was hoping you’d tag along.”

“You want me to assess him? You know that’s never been my strong point.”

“No, that’s my job. I want you to be you. The way you were when I joined SHIELD.”

“You want me to make friends with the Winter Soldier?” He sounds incredulous. As he should be, if that's what she meant.

“Not the Soldier, Bucky.”

Clint huffs out a laugh at that. “Semantics,” he says missing her point entirely, then continues, “And if he doesn’t want to be friends?”

“Help Steve. You know firsthand how hard his rehabilitation project is. Help him so he doesn’t run out of steam or fuck up.” Steve already has Sam, but the more the merrier as the saying goes. Or the wider a support network, the lesser risk of Barnes freaking out and taking someone out by accident.

“So, that’s your play? Rehabilitation.”

“Had you expected something else?”

“I mean, kinda, yeah. He did shoot you. Twice.”

A few weeks ago, he would have been right, but a lot can happen in a few weeks. In just four days she had gone from thinking she worked for the good guys to tearing down the husk of Hydra infected SHIELD. And it is true that Barnes had shot her. For a given definition of true. It had been Barnes’ finger on the trigger but blaming him for it makes about as much sense as blaming the gun. As far as Natasha can tell, the Winter Soldier was what had been left after Hydra had gutted Barnes and left a robot in his place.

“I shot you,” she reminds Clint, and this is true for any definition of the word. It had been her decision, not some leftover programming. When Fury had sent Clint to kill her, he had cornered her instead and she had shot him to make sure he couldn’t follow her. During her own rehabilitation, she had badly wanted him to blame her for it, but he never had. It had thoroughly stumped her at the time. Sometimes it still did.

“That’s okay, you didn’t mean anything by it,” he says and yawns, ruining his unconvincing attempt to look serious.

“I meant to stop you. You’re lucky I decided to go for the calf instead of your knee.”

He pulls his leg up, rests the foot on his other knee, rubs a thumb along the aforementioned calf. “It still hurts sometimes. During thunderstorms.”

There are a lot of reasons why Natasha considers Clint her closest friend. He can hold his own on a team of super-powered heroes with nothing but a bow and arrow, he acted like the rock-solid presence she needed when she switched sides, and he has the unique ability to say the most stupid things in serious situations without making fun of anyone but himself.

She stares up at the darkening sky, says, “Why do I put up with this?” and regrets it instantly.

The fortune is ripped in two as they both scrabble for it, she crumples her half up and throws it over the side of the balcony before he can stop her.

“Spoilsport.”

“You know it.”

“Okay. Dinner. Making friends. Support.” He follows the list with another yawn. She can almost hear his jaws creak with it.

“That’s the plan,” Natasha confirms. The only addition to it is her plan for the next day. But making use of the meager intel Fury provided is a one-person job. No point in bringing Clint in on that till she’s seen how it plays out.

 

* * *

 

There are bad days and then there are days that don’t even have the decency to begin at dawn, but just take over from the previous day around midnight. Days when Bucky can’t sleep because there’s a rope wrapped around his chest that makes breathing near impossible. Like his skin is several sizes too small and the itch is bone-deep. He feels rudderless, a sail flapping in the wind after someone forgot to tie it down. He’s not a weapon anymore, or at least he’s a weapon who gets to decide for himself when he’s put to use, but sometimes he wishes someone would aim him at a problem and let him loose. Making choices for himself didn’t use to be hard. Has only become hard after he spent a few decades being denied of them.

 

Living on his own means he must make choices, establish routines of his own now that Steve isn’t there to make sure he eats. If he skips a meal, his stomach will begin to growl at him, if he skips more than one, he’ll eventually get nauseated. So, he has to decide what to eat and do something to get it. Even if that something is ordering a stack of pizzas through an app on his phone when he can’t stomach interacting with people. Baby steps, like Romanoff said, though on bad days it feels more like crawling.

Tonight is one of the worst in a while, the worst since Steve coaxed him back to the States. He can’t sleep, can’t sit still for more than a few seconds at a time, can’t even focus on reading for crying out loud. There really is only one thing to do with all this restless energy.

The good thing about living in New York is that there is always someone else awake. It’s never quiet here. Bucky can hear people living all around him. He isn’t alone and it’s sort of a comfort to him. (Which is a mystery all in itself. Having people around him means the risk of getting hurt, risk of hurting someone. But being alone is being alone with all that he has done. The pain he has caused.) He can go outside and not look out of place. His preference for long sleeves and a glove on his left hand doesn’t attract as much notice at night when it’s cooler outside.

He puts on his running shoes and tries to locate some fresh clothes. There isn’t a lot to choose from. He needs to do his laundry and he tosses some of it in a backpack to take it with him on his run. Getting some exercise and doing the laundry, Steve would be proud. Maybe if Hydra had had less focus on killing people and more on establishing routines, he wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s a ridiculous thought and the harsh laugh dies on his lips.

Fuck it, if he can’t laugh at it, then who the hell can?

Running shoes, sweatpants, a white tank top, and a thin hoodie that is loose enough to conceal the SIG-Sauer at his side. Ready, set, go.

 

The night air is cool on his skin. The steady thump of his feet on the pavement lulls his overworked brain into something that resembles peace. It almost makes it possible for him to ignore the windows staring down at him, eyes looking at him without seeing.

 

He feels good enough after the run to stop by a coffee shop for breakfast after he has picked up his clean clothes from the laundromat. He’s not the only person with that idea, though. A long line stretches away from the check-out. He must have run for three or four hours to hit the start of the morning rush. No matter. He needs to eat; he’ll just have to grin and bear it. He gets into line behind a man in business attire, scans the room for possible threats. There's a guy in the corner who Bucky pegs to be ex-military by the line of his shoulders and the way he scans the room. A young woman further ahead in the other line who either practices martial arts or professional dancing judging by the control she has over her movements. Neither has paid him too much or too little attention, so they don’t send him running, just make him keep an extra watch on them.

He places his order, tries not to think about eating muffins and granola bars while he waits for his coffee.

“I wish I had that kind of stamina,” says a woman standing next to him, waiting to be called. “Going for a run this early in the day.”

It takes him a few seconds to register that she’s talking to him. It’s the damn haircut. Before he got it he was all but invisible to most women. Now, not so much.  “It’s not a matter of stamina, ma’am,” he says, “It’s a matter of having loud neighbors.” Doesn’t say it’s a matter of not being able to sleep because he has fire ants crawling under his skin and images of blood and pain when he closes his eyes.

Her smile shifts in character, signaling that it was the wrong thing to say. “I’m not _that_ much older than you, young man.” She doesn’t sound annoyed, there’s humor in her voice, but he can’t quite read the nature of her smile. She has a few gray hairs and lines around her eyes and mouth when he looks closer at her. Late forties, maybe early fifties if she has good genes. Younger than him in other words. Chronologically at least.

“Sorry, just out of the military. Hard habit to break,” the lie comes easily to him, to hide the flash of uncertainty. Being forced to endure Romanoff’s company has paid off. He can tell straight lies without having to think about it now.

“Oh,” she says with regret painted on her forehead. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make fun of you. My son enlisted a few months ago. I know how much that changes a man.” She sighs, holds a perfectly manicured hand to her brow. “Which only proves your point.”

There are things he should say now. Jokes to make her less self-conscious. Bucky knows this is how this is supposed to go and can’t come up with a single one of them. Finally, he goes for the truth, “Don’t worry about it. I’m much older than I look.”

She laughs and mercifully is called to collect her order. When his comes up a minute later, the barista has to call the name he gave twice before he reacts. Maybe he should start giving his given name. James is a common enough name; it won’t make him stand out and there’s a chance he will actually hear it when he’s called.

Bucky scarfs down a muffin on his way home, too hungry to wait. He doesn’t even recognize the figure by the mailboxes in the lobby of his building when he enters it. It’s only when she shifts his alarm bells go off and he recognizes Romanoff.

She is right there and he damn near flees when he sees her. But he has no reason to. She’s Steve’s friend and she hasn’t done anything to make him react like this except show up in his building. She picked him up here the other day for fuck’s sake, it’s not news to him that she knows his address. It’s a stupid fight or flight response and maybe he should feel good that his instinct isn’t to go for the SIG-Sauer at his side this time, but he doesn’t. The rage and disappointment with his stupid reaction comes out in his words. “That’s funny, I’m pretty sure I didn’t order a babysitter.”

Her back goes ramrod straight and the outline of her ever-present gun is visible at the small of her back. Something that he’d have taken for guilt on anyone else slips off her face as she turns and says, “I was just dropping this off. Saw it and thought you might like it.” She holds up a slim book with an envelope sticking out it. The cover has a black and white photo on it, larger letter proclaiming the title to be _Brooklyn Is_ , smaller writing underneath that he doesn’t catch.

“You could just have left it on my coffee table. I’m assuming you know how to get in,” Bucky says despite all evidence to the contrary. No one has been inside his apartment while he’s been out. He has made sure of that with tripwires, motion-detectors, and strands of hair caught in doors and windows. But he hasn’t slept more than a few hours since they returned from that joke of a mission and something about her clear display of guilt puts him even more off balance. Dealing with her was easier when all she presented him with was a solid wall of fuck-you. He still hasn’t figured out what he’d done for her to change her mind about him. Had she expected him to fail the mission?

“You know what? Never mind. Assholes don’t get free books.” Romanoff pushes past him before he has a chance to take it back.

Her words curl around his throat, make it impossible for him to speak, and he just stands there, holding the door open, watching her red hair whip in the wind like an admonishment as she disappears into the crowd.

When did he ever begin to worry about what the Black Widow thought of him?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was recently reminded about the film “Cleaner” that Samuel L. Jackson stared in 12 years ago. It’s not a good film, but the idea of Nick Fury pretending to be a cleaner to escape notice was just too good to pass up.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve hosts a dinner party, Nat gifts a certain book to a friendlier recipient, and Bucky reaches out.

It’s rude to be late for a party, ruder still to plan on it, but Natasha wants Clint to have a chance to get a feel for Barnes before she shows up. To make up for it, she wraps a silk ribbon around the book she had attempted to give to Barnes and brings it along with a bottle of Asgardian mead. Steve grew up in Brooklyn, too, and he’ll appreciate the gesture more than Barnes did.

Twenty-five minutes past the hour, Steve lets her inside with a smile and a, “You made it.” The sound of voices and the scent of cooking waft past him.

She hugs him, says, “I’m sorry I’m late,” but he waves her off. Continues with, “Something smells amazing.”

“You should tell Bucky that. He’s doing the cooking.”

In just over a month Barnes has gone from being on the run to cooking for the Avengers. Someone else might have sounded self-satisfied saying that. They might even have squeezed in a smug, ‘Told you so.’ Not Steve, though. He sounds happy. He is surrounded by friends and his oldest friend is cooking for them. Life couldn’t be better.

“I should give this to him then,” she says and holds up the book and the bottle of mead.

Steve’s face splits into a grin. “Oh, this is perfect. Wait a sec,” he says and calls over his shoulder, “Buck, come look at this.” He turns back to her and explains, “Bucky told me about this book earlier, he’s been reading it.”

Of course, he has. She had shown Barnes the book when he surprised her in his building, and he had been close enough to read the text on the front cover. Natasha supposes this is a good thing. Seeing the book had made him want to get his hands on a copy for himself. And he liked it well enough to tell Steve about it. There’s a sense of humor to it, pettiness, too. Progress in other words. A man holding on to his humanity tooth and nail isn’t going to be curious about unwanted gifts. It takes energy, even more so to do something about it. But more to the point, it is a move she didn’t expect him to make.

Barnes comes around the corner drying his hands on a tea towel. The corner of his mouth puckers as he bites the inside of his lip briefly, then he says, “What?” to Steve.

Steve holds up the book. “Look at what Nat just gave me.”

He smirks, has the audacity to say, “Yeah? What a coincidence.”

She raises an eyebrow for him to see, but refrains from calling him out in front of Steve. Bucky Barnes has a personality setting that doesn’t include blank stares or plain hostility. Who would have seen that coming?

 

Clint has made no progress with his making friends with Barnes plans and he tells her as much with a minute shake of his head when Natasha signs him for an update before dinner. They have to be very discreet about it. Sharon is too good of an agent to miss obvious signaling, and Sam, Maria, and Steve are just too damn observant for their own good. Natasha wants to question him on the specifics, but they can’t very well sneak off to the bathroom together without being noticed. They will have to catch up later.

The food is surprisingly good. Barnes is skilled in the kitchen, but he handles the dinner with less finesse, speaks only when spoken to and never for long. He’s seated on the same side of the table as she is, with Sam between them so she can’t even study him without being obvious about it. It helps a little when they move out onto the balcony, but Barnes slips away after about an hour, stays away for longer than a bathroom visit can justify. Natasha solves her dilemma by pouring the remaining white wine into half-empty glasses and uses the now empty bottle as an excuse to go inside.

Barnes isn’t in the lounging area, nor back at the dining table, but then she didn’t expect him to. He’s either slipped out (unlikely as this would make Steve worry since he hasn’t said goodbye), in one of the bathrooms (likewise unlikely, it’s been too long), or in the kitchen – the one place where introvert or private party-goers everywhere always seem to gravitate toward.

She pushes the kitchen door open and stops abruptly as if surprised when she sees him sitting on the kitchen counter. “I’m sorry, didn’t know you were here.”

Barnes slides off the kitchen counter, leans against it. Smoke curls up from the sink where he threw his cigarette. “Liar,” he says, but there’s no rancor to it.

Natasha shrugs, steps inside to let the door close behind her. “Fine. But you don’t have to hide in the kitchen. No one here is going to hurt you.”

His t-shirt wrinkles when he crosses his arms over his chest. “Really.”

She puts the empty bottle on the counter near her. Lets her arms dangle along her sides. Neutral, not a trace of defense or offense in her stance. “I’m not asking you to trust me, Barnes. I’m telling you, I’m not your enemy.”

His eyes are slivers of ice, then he blinks and looks away.

“I’ve been where you are now. Running away won’t make you whole, it will just make you lonely.” She knows lonely’s kinder twin alone very well, prefers it over company regularly, but Barnes isn’t her. Everything Steve has told her about him before says that he used to enjoy being social. Always dragging Steve with him to meet people, see things. And now he is hiding out in a kitchen while the rest of the party are out on the balcony.

“Does wonders for the voices in my head, though,” he says, and she can’t tell if he’s joking.

Steve can help him deal with how to acclimate to living in a completely different era. Sam and Clint can offer support when it comes to dealing with PTSD. Thankfully, none of them has any experience with relearning how to become a person again. It’s the one thing Natasha can offer they can’t. The one test she can’t allow him to fail. “Listen, if you need to talk with someone – someone other than the voices in your head – you have my number. It’s a lot to deal with, trying to become human again.”

A week ago, Barnes would have rolled his eyes at her, a month ago, he’d have ignored her. Now he says, “Okay,” looks her in the eyes and even follows her out of the kitchen after she’s gotten a fresh bottle of wine out of the fridge.

It feels like a victory.

 

* * *

 

Back when Steve had been the smaller of the two Bucky had taken up boxing. He’d been good at it, too. Had won championships from what Steve tells him, though he can’t remember that part. But he remembers the fights, the sparring. It had made him feel alive in ways that few things did these days. Not because of the violence, though it’s an inescapable part of it, what appeals to him is having to push himself, having to focus on a task or risk getting knocked on his ass. It’s stopping himself from thinking about anything other than the ever-shifting now.

He spars with Steve from time to time, but it always leaves him frustrated. Steve got the pure Super Soldier Serum, not the bastard version Bucky got. Without having to work for it Steve is stronger and faster than Bucky. But Steve also worries too much, he only uses a fraction of that strength when they spar. Doesn’t matter that Bucky assures him that he can take it, Steve still acts like he’s made of glass. Sparring with Sam is better. Sam is a trained soldier, he can hold his own without the serum in a sparring match, and he doesn’t stare at the arm all the time as some people do. Problem is that he fights by the rules when sparring. There’s no fighting dirty with Sam. Not now that they’re on the same side. What Bucky wants, what he needs, is someone vicious who isn’t afraid to go for the soft spots should he be so stupid as to leave himself open to an attack. Someone who will keep him on his toes. He knows the answer to his problem already; he just doesn’t like it.

It takes him several days to pick up the phone, scroll back through old messages to find the one Romanoff send him from Steve’s phone, save the number into his contacts, and text her, ‘I wanna punch something. Wanna join me?’

Her reply comes less than a minute later, ‘Sure. As long as it’s not orphans. At the gym in an hour?’

He’s at the gym in the Avengers Tower half an hour later. Waiting around in his apartment will only make him restless and by turning up early he gets to keep an eye on when Romanoff shows up. She does so a few minutes before the agreed time, sees him in his workout clothes by the dumbbells, and greets him with a smile that’s too sharp around the edges to look entirely friendly. At the exact time they agreed upon, she’s standing next to him, hand and foot wraps dangling from her hand.

“How do we do this? With an audience or without?” she asks.

Bucky puts the weights down and rolls his shoulders to loosen tense muscles. He doesn’t like to have an audience, prefers to remain in the background, but being locked in a room with Romanoff doesn’t sound that comfortable either. Still, he’s survived worse. “Without.”

She nods. “Right this way.” She walks without a sound, not even to his enhanced hearing. Her bare feet touching down on the ball of her foot instead of the heel. It makes her look like a dancer or gymnast. The bright colors of her tights and loose tank top only supports this. Nothing about her reveals just how deadly she is except maybe the few scars he can see. A pink and puckered circle near her left shoulder blade, a nearly invisible line down her right triceps, and one across her calf. He does not doubt that there are more under her clothes.

She had been wearing neutral black workout clothes when she’d cornered him by the heavy bags to recruit him for a mission. There’s a possibility that she owns a range of different workout clothes and he’s reading too much into the switch to these colorful ones, but she is the Black Widow, she doesn’t do anything for the hell of it. It’s impossible to see it as anything other than yet another attempt to seem harmless. Like the book. Like the pieces of advice, she’s been sprinkling their conversations with. But that’s fine, if she wants to pretend to be nice, he can go along with it. Test how far she’s willing to take it. Testing her is part of the reason why Bucky wants to spar with her in the first place.

They reach the doors in the back of the gym and Romanoff aims for the room farthest away. The door is no different from the others, except that this one is labeled by an occupied/unoccupied slider that Romanoff slides to occupied as they enter. There’s an honest-to-god raised boxing ring in the middle of the room. Red ropes lining it and not a mirror in sight. It’s… a lot better than he has expected. Makes for more comfort than the room he’s been using when sparring with Steve or Sam. Padded flooring and mirrored walls are fine and dandy when learning routines, not so great on days when he’d rather not look himself in the eye.

Since Romanoff is barefooted, he removes his shoes and socks before he starts wrapping his hands, making sure the left one has a fat layer of padding across the knuckles. He rolls his shoulders again, the tightness in them and across his chest has gotten worse over the week. It doesn’t seem to get better, however much he stretches.

Once Romanoff is done, she looks over at him with a, “Ready?” which he answers with a nod and they both climb up onto the boxing ring.

She eyes his arm once they start circling each other and he angles his body, presenting his right side to her instead of facing her straight on. He’s all too familiar with that reaction to his arm. With a twinge of disappointment, he says, “Don’t worry, I won’t use it on you.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Don’t hold back on my account,” she says in a low drawl.

“Yeah, well, still gonna. Might break bones otherwise.”

“If you manage to hit me, sure.” She tilts her chin up, grins. The overhead lighting makes her eyes sparkle.

The utter defiance of this five-foot three-inches woman makes him chuckle and she’s sliding under his arm before he figures out that was her plan. Romanoff punches the back of his knee to prove her point, making it buckle. Playing dirty is a-okay with him, it’s what he texted her for. He kicks out behind himself. Feels the fabric of her top slide under his foot as she dodges the kick. Her next attack is a punch aimed at his ribs. He blocks it easily with his left arm. Sees the knee aiming for his groin too late to block it too and takes the hit with his thigh as he sidesteps.

He wanted vicious and he got it. Bucky grins, forces her back with a couple of kicks that she redirects away from her body.

They circle each other again.

“Though you wanted to punch something,” she says.

Oh, he does. But he’s not too keen on letting her have another go at giving him a kick in the nuts. “Forgot to bring a protective cup.”

“I didn’t think you’d want me to go easy on you, Barnes, but if that’s what you want.” She shrugs. There’s not a trace of mocking in her voice or face. The offer looks like a genuine for all he can tell. That only annoys him more.

Bucky steps closer, launches a set of punches and kicks that drives her back towards the ropes. “Not a chance.”

“Good.” She aims a kick at his head, slips under his arm when he blocks it with an arm.

Romanoff is dangerous in a way Steve isn’t. Not just because of her fighting skills. Steve looks the way he fights, athletic and strong, while she’s small and soft looking. She moves with the grace and rhythm of a dancer until she doesn’t, her punches and kicks connect with greater strength than her small frame suggests. Yet it feels right when he’s fighting her. Exciting. Pushes him to do better than he would otherwise at a sparring match.

He decides to kick it up a notch. Grabs her wrist the next time she throws a punch at him, yanks hard on it, twisting her around and pins her back against his chest, arm around her neck in a chokehold. Keeps her there as she struggles. After a few unsuccessful attempts to dislodge him, she taps his arm twice with her hand. They haven’t agreed on any signal, but he lets go instinctively and take a step back. She doesn’t move. She stays there, head bend and her arm still raised halfway to her neck. He can’t see her face from this angle, but the muscles of her back are bunched up and tense.

“Romanoff,” he says but it doesn’t seem to register with her. “Hey. Romanoff,” he tries, this time with a raised voice.

She shakes her head, then her shoulders as if ridding herself of an unpleasant sensation.

“What happened?” Bucky asks when she turns to face him.

She tilts her head, looks at him with an arched eyebrow.

Right. Sharing is caring and they don’t do either. Whatever. He shrugs and only just manages to catch her ankle when she kicks out at his head. Doesn’t do him any good. Her other foot hits him in the chest and she kicks off, using him as a springboard for a backflip. She lands with hardly a sound, looking yet again like the dancer she isn’t. Greets him with a series of kicks when he tries to trap her up against the ropes.

There’s no background music playing here unlike out in the rest of the gym. The slaps of bandage-wrapped extremities connecting with flesh are loud in the silence. It makes for a fast, irregular rhythm as they trade blows and blocks, weaves in and out in a violent sort of dance. Makes him feel more alive than he has in decades.

After a while it makes him sweat like a pig, too.

Romanoff’s braid is all but fallen apart, loose strands sticking to her face, so at least he’s not the only one feeling fatigued.

Too late Bucky realizes that he shouldn’t let Romanoff get too wide a distance between. She takes a couple of loping steps back towards him, gunning for her showstopper move no doubt. He remembers those thighs wrapped around his body. The strength of them. Grabs a fistful of her tank top with his left hand and keeps her from taking off, moves with her momentum to send her away from him, but she twists in his grip, wraps her legs around his arm and brings him to the ground. The floor is padded, but it still knocks the air from him with the impact. Romanoff doesn’t attempt to get a lock on his left arm, rolls over to get to her feet. He doesn’t.

“Ow,” he says. Stays flat on the floor with arms splayed, breathing hard.

A wry grin flash across her face before she yanks the tank top off, mops her face with it, and throws it over the side of the ring. “Get up.”

The narrow strip of skin between her high-waisted tights and sports bra is slick with sweat. More drips off strands of her hair. Her chest heaving with deep breaths. Good. It makes Bucky feel less ridiculous for not wanting to move.

“Uh,” he says. “Call it a tie? I can’t get up.”

Her raised fists drop instantly, and she braces her hands on her knees and lets out a breath somewhere between a laugh and a groan. “Fucking finally.” The rope shakes a little when Romanoff grabs on to it for support as she lowers herself to the floor. “Remind me never to spar with you ever again.”

Laughter bubbles within his chest, the adrenaline from the fight making him feel high. He rubs his hands over his face to hide it. “Like I’d be stupid enough to ask you to.”

“Well,” she says.

“God, I hate you.”

She laughs and he sits up to kick her nearest foot.

The tightness over his chest rears its ugly head as he cools, sore muscles complaining. Bucky rolls his shoulders, twists his torso this way and that while he remains seated on the floor, but all he gets for his trouble is cartilage creaking. The band around his chest is still there.

“Did you miss an oil change?”

“More like several.” He wraps his arm over his head, cartilage popping in his neck. Doesn’t do shit for his back or chest.

Romanoff looks at him speculatively, says, “Do you want help with that or is suffering in silence more your kind of thing?”

He flips her off, rolls his eyes when she mirrors his gesture, and says, “What kind of help?”

“Popping your sternum. That’s the problem, right? Chest tight and uncomfortable?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve tried the door frame chest stretch?” She mimics the move by holding her arms out from her in straight angles, her elbows bent at ninety degrees.

He nods.

“I don’t know if this works with your arm, but I’ll give it a try if you want me to.”

Letting Romanoff do him a favor means he’ll owe her, and Bucky has enough debt as it is. Weak and pathetic, he asks, “Try what?”

“The extended chest stretch, no door frames needed,” she says with a blinding smile that ought to be the centerpiece in some commercial for dodgy products. It slips off her face like the mask it is. “Manuel partnered stretching where I put my feet at the small of your back and pull your arms back. Nothing revolutionary, but it usually works for Clint.”

He could get Steve to help him, he’ll be happy to. Greater upper body strength, less likely to make Bucky want to lash out in self-defense. “Okay.” He shifts to turn his back to her while still sitting on the floor of the boxing ring. Doesn’t flinch when her feet push against the small of his back.

“Arms behind you, palms flat against my thighs,” she says and guides his hands along the outside of her thighs. Mumbles, “How tall are you?” and slides further back to allow him to extend his arms fully. When she’s satisfied with their position, she says, “Don’t fight it. It won’t work if you do.” Loops her fingers loosely around his wrists and says, “Tell me when you’re ready.”

Every fiber of his being is yelling for him to pull free, to not let her trap him like this. He could if he wanted to. Easily. Fast and vicious as she is, she’s no match for his full strength. He knows this. He’s not going to panic now. Eventually, he nods. “Go for it.”

She pulls slowly, steadily, when he feels like he can’t go any further, she says, “Okay, now breathe out,” and pushes her feet firmer against the small of his back, getting him to lean back a few more inches.

His sternum pops audibly, and his chest expands about four sizes. Christ, it feels good. Air filling his lungs right down to the bottom of them. Bucky stands, rolls his shoulders, marveling at how loose he feels. He glances over at her, “Thanks,” he says and means it.

She nods. “It might help if you straighten up, though. Hunching your shoulders won’t make you smaller. It’ll just make you hunched up,” Romanoff says, getting to her feet, too.

Right. Because standing up straight is such an easy thing to do after all that he’s done. The pain he has caused. He distracts himself by unwrapping his hands while she jumps down from the boxing ring.

“Or you could just use a masseuse like everyone else. Let them work some of the knots out of your muscles,” she says when he doesn’t answer. “I’ll text you the contact info for the one Steve and Tony uses. She has experience with augmented bodies.”

He says, “Thanks,” knowing full well that he’ll never call. The thought of some stranger working on his body makes his skin itch. He jumps down from the ring, too, picks up his socks and shoes. Stands there without knowing what to say next.

Romanoff looks at him with a lopsided smile. “We should do this again sometime. Haven’t had a workout like this in ages.”

“Sure,” he says. A drop of sweat slides down his spine to join its friends in the wet fabric. “How about sometime in the next century?”

“Counting on it,” she says and goddamn winks at him.

Bucky stares at her retreating back in disbelief until the door closes behind her.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony throws a party at the Avengers Tower and - much to everyone's surprise - Bucky both attents AND doesn't spend his time there moping. Plus, Natasha makes plans.

There are drawbacks to being an Avenger. Despite all the good, it allows Natasha to do. Despite the found family, it has unexpectedly provided her with, there are drawbacks. Loss of anonymity is the most important one. But there is also stuff like the party Stark is throwing at the Avengers Tower this evening. A party Natasha has to participate in when she’d much rather go over the information one of her contacts gave her on what she suspects is a former Red Room exec now living in Chile.

But it’s fine. It’s part of the job. She can put on a pretty dress and a smile; mingle like she likes doing this and wouldn’t much rather be working.

According to Pepper, the unofficial excuse for this particular party is that there have been no major incidents in over a month, which is a very valid excuse in the world they are living in. The official one isn’t much more detailed, but then it doesn’t need to be. It doesn’t take much to convince people to attend a party with at the Avengers Tower, even less when the Avengers participate, too. And the rest of the team seem to be enjoying themselves. Steve looks like a proud mom at a dance recital whenever he glances over at Barnes. As he’s right to be proud. Barnes is talking with people while looking if not relaxed then at least non-murdery. He talked with Clint for almost half an hour, which has to be some kind of record.

Natasha talks with Clint, too. A good while later so it doesn’t look like he’s reporting to her. Anyway, they’re friends of course they talk. Feeling guilty about asking him a few questions is stupid and she’s not going to give in to it.

“How did it go?” she asks, plumping down onto the couch next to Clint, hands him one of the two beer bottles she got at the bar.

He takes it with an appreciative and somewhat distracted grin and returns his attention to the other guests milling around. “How did what go?”

“Your talk with he-who-shall-not-be-named.”

He shoots her another glance, this one tinged with amusement. “It went okay. He’s good at talking without saying much. Only caught his attention when I mentioned some new gadgets I tried out in Afghanistan. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he’d served in a recent war, not one seventy years ago.”

Shoptalk in other words. The professional’s alternative to small talk.

“You could offer him a cigarette to get on his good side,” Natasha suggests instead of questioning him about the specifics. Friendly talk, not debrief, even though it goes against her better instincts to stick to it.

Clint pats his pockets in imitation of Barnes’ relentless search for cigarettes he doesn’t have. “You noticed that, too?”

“Since I’m not blind, then yeah.”

He puts his hand on her knee, looks at her with a mock-serious expression. “This might come as a surprise, Nat, but there are people who don’t catalog every gesture other people make.”

“I’m sure there are, but I’m not one of them.”

“No shit,” Clint says dryly. “Where’d I get one anyway?”

He catches sight of her head tilt and her raised eyebrows. “Never mind, forgot who I was talking to.”

Predictability is death to spies, but Natasha is not just a spy these days and Clint is her friend. Maybe a few decades from now she’ll be able to escape the claustrophobic feeling she gets whenever she establishes routines for the people around her to see and recognize. Maybe. “Do you want cigarettes or not?”

He grins and nods, one party-smoker to another, but grimaces when she pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. “Since when do you smoke Marlboro?”

Since she was in her twenties and Marlboro was the brand selected by the higher-ups in the Red Room for her and her fellow Black Widow trainees to smoke to blend in as “authentic” Americans, whatever that meant. What has made her pick it now decades later is a whole different and considerably more complicated question to answer. “Beggars can’t be choosy.”

He wrinkles his nose at her. “Why don’t you offer him one?”

“Because he didn’t take the last gift, I tried to give him very well?”

“He reached out to you about sparring, though,” Clint says and annoyingly he has a point.

Besides, getting an extreme case of déjà vu while sparring with Barnes isn’t a reason for not wanting to talk with him, it’s a bad excuse and maybe a sign her age is catching up with her. Might as well get it over with. “Fine, I’ll do it if you can’t be bothered to help.”

“Atta girl,” Clint says and grunts when she elbows him.

 

Natasha waits till Barnes retreats from a conversation with Maria and goes to sit by the bar, nursing a glass of something golden. Making her way towards him, she nods in greeting when he looks at her in the mirror behind the bar and takes a seat with an empty chair between them. The bartender comes over and she orders a vodka, because dammit, she’s allowed to be a little Russian once in a while. When the drink arrives, she turns around in her seat to face the room, leans back to rest her elbows on the bar behind her.

Even with her back to the mirror, she can feel Barnes’ eyes boring into her. It eases after a little while and a sideways glance shows that he has returned to his people watching.

“You shouldn’t stare at people like you want to murder them. It makes them very uncomfortable,” Natasha says, turning her head to look over at him.

He takes a deep pull of his glass. “Who says that’s not what I’m planning to do?”

“You showed up. As in, you’re attending a party at the Avengers Tower. You’ve talked with people not named Steve. And you haven’t stepped out for a smoke despite clearly wanting to.”

His eyes are void of any emotion other than scorn. He puts his glass down, fists his right hand and holds up his index finger. “Wilson was sure I wouldn’t.” The middle finger goes up. “Said I couldn’t mingle if my life depended on it.” The ring finger follows the other two. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

Natasha smiles. It’s damn near impossible not to. Spite can be a powerful motivator, can keep you going for longer than willpower. “Did you know they used to tell us stories about you? Back in the Red Room, I mean. You were the monster under our beds. Behave or the Winter Soldier will come for you.”

Barnes swallows and looks away. The past is still a sore point for him.

She continued quickly, to disperse the discomfort so plain in the rigidity of his shoulders. “What do you think they’d say about this? Their greatest asset has run away and is having a drink with a rogue Black Widow?”

A twitch of a smile. He glances her way without meeting her eyes. “Probably wouldn’t like that much.”

Natasha lifts her glass, holds it out to him. “Here’s to hoping.”

They clink glasses and drink.

Minutes tick by in silence. Another glance over at Barnes tells her he’s back at staring holes in the mirror as he watches the room. It doesn’t look like he’s going to start on a new subject on his own volition, but he’s not moving away either. He even orders a refill of his drink when he empties the one he has. She takes it as an opening, looks over at him and says, “I might have a job coming up that I could use you as a backup for if you’re interested.”

“What kind?” His answer is immediate. Shoptalk is easy. Shoptalk is safe.

“Recon mostly. Limited violence if we’re lucky.” The Red Room employee is going to die if he is the man the intel suggests he is, but there’s no need to tell Barnes this yet. She’s not going to force him to do the deed.

“That doesn’t tell me much.”

“There’s not much to tell at this point. Still investigating. I just wanted to hear if you’re interested. I can ask someone else if you’re not.”

He sighs. Looks down at the glass in his hand, then over at Natasha. “I’m up for a job as long as it not another farce as that Columbus thing was.”

“It’s not. I can promise you that much.”

With a nod, he says, “Okay, I’m in.”

“Great. I’ll text you when I know more.”

He doesn’t look away and neither does she. It doesn’t surprise her when the next words out of his mouth are a question. The directness of them, on the other hand, does. “Why are you being nice to me?”

She shrugs, doesn’t say because she’s been where he is, and her life’s mission is to right the wrongs she has committed. “It’s been more than six months since you tried to kill anyone I know. I can only carry a grudge for so long before it becomes old news.”

His mouth twists up in an involuntary smile. It makes him look younger, sweeter. Human. It’s gone as fast as it appears.

Steve has a photo of himself with the Howling Commandos taken at some point during the war. They all look dirty, worn, but happy. Caught laughing at something someone had said. When he smiles, Barnes almost looks like the guy he was back then, far removed from the withdrawn, sour man he is now, and Natasha can see why Steve likes him so much. That guy must have been easy to like.

She digs the unopened packet of cigarettes out of her purse and throws it on the bar. “You take these. They wreak havoc on my lungs anyway,” she says and walks away before he has a chance to answer.

 

* * *

 

The three days it takes for Romanoff to text him are longer than they have any right to me. Bucky isn’t usually impatient, he can’t afford to be as a sniper, but waiting for a target to appear is different from waiting to find out if Romanoff has a job for him or not. It makes him antsy.

When she finally does text him, he invites her over to his place instead of suggesting that they meet up at Steve’s. He has to grow the fuck up at some point, might as well get on with it before his hundredth birthday.

He lets her in when she shows up the next day with a paper bag in one hand a leather briefcase in the other. Says, “Trying to buy me off won’t make me like you more,” when she hands him the paper bag to shrug out of her jacket.

“Those aren’t just here for your sake. You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry,” she says with a smirk like she’s just told a joke instead of an off-brand version of a Snickers commercial.

Bucky turns away and walks into his living room and does his best not to jump when he turns around to find her right behind him – socks make her walk just as silent as bare feet, apparently.

She scans the room and it’s like he’s seeing it through her eyes. The bare walls, the sheets he’s draped over curtain rods, the sparse and mostly unused furniture, and the books in paper bags by the couch. It looks more impersonal than a safe house, doesn’t even begin to pretend that it’s anything other than a place to sleep. He hasn’t made any attempts to make it look like a home. He swallows, painfully aware of why Steve had frowned so much when he visited the other day. It’s been weeks since he moved in. He hasn’t even framed the pencil drawings Steve gave him.

Romanoff interrupts his thoughts with a, “Love what you’ve done with the place. Scandi minimalism is all the rage from what I hear.” She turns towards him, and the grin slides off her face. He hates being this transparent. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. I lived in SHIELD safe houses for years before I got my own place. The fact that you’ve bought your own furniture is a step up from where I was in your situation. Buy some curtains and a throw pillow or two for the sofa. Maybe—maybe pick some artwork you like to look at for the walls. It won’t take a lot to make it look like someone is living here, you’re already halfway there.”

It’s another ‘regain your humanity’ spiels. Like being a human being is his end goal and not the root cause of his problems. Like the faces of people Bucky has killed don’t haunt him both awake and in his sleep. But she has a point. If it looks like a home, he might start to believe it is one. If he believes, maybe other people will, too.

“Thanks for the pep talk, mom,” he says and gestures for her to sit at the dinner table where he’s set out coffee mugs and a twin to the coffee press Steve owns.

She shoots him a glance he can’t decipher but sits down and pulls out a folder from her briefcase while he fetches a couple of plates for the greasy cakes she bought and pours coffee for both of them. He flips open the folder when she hands it to him. The first image is of an old man, mid-nineties and with a bad dye job that has turned his hair stark black against gray eyebrows. The image is candid, with the man talking to someone out of frame, taken from far away judging by the blurred shapes of leaves around the edges of the image. The second image is a headshot and the man is much younger in it, wearing a military uniform that Bucky doesn’t recognize.

“That’s the target. Yegor Ignatov Petrov” There’s something strange in Romanoff’s voice and he looks up, but her expression reveals nothing. “One of the more inventive people working for Leviathan,” she says like it’s supposed to mean something to him.

“Unless you’re talking the biblical sea monster, I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

A smile sharp enough to cut vibranium to pieces flash over her face, then she says, “An old Soviet agency. Or, it started as an agency but turned into something crueler. Hydra with more-or-less official government backing, similar methods, anyway. Experimented on people. Killed even more. Petrov used to work for them, he was one of the higher-ups.” There’s something hard in the lines of her face, Bucky hasn’t seen it before. Her speech pattern is different from her usual one. It makes the resentment and distrust she faced him with when they first met look welcoming.

“Used to?”

“The organization is dead as far as I can tell, and he’s retired. Wants to live the remaining of his life somewhere warm. Somewhere his past won’t be able to reach him.” She sounds like Petrov isn’t going to get what he wants.

“So, this is a kill mission,” he says. An observation, not a question.

Romanoff’s eyes are crystal clear, and they meet his without the slightest twitch. “Yes.”

Right. There’s a reason why she asked him after all. Whatever else he is, he will always be the Winter Soldier to her. “I see why you didn’t ask Steve.”

“Oh, Steve was never an option for this kind of job. But I thought you might be interested. It’s closer to your area of expertise than his.”

He is interested, very interested, but that’s the problem. Wanting to kill a man, even one who used to experiment on people for a living, doesn’t really fit with the reformed assassin thing he has been working towards for a while now.

Bucky flips through the rest of the folder without answering. Other than the pictures of the mark, there are maps, satellite images, surveillance photos of a house with people entering and exiting it, and a log of what he assumes are the names of the people along with dates and times marking the length of their stay in the house. Some of the names have penciled in asterisks next to them. At the end of the log, there are two hand-written lists with the schedules of the marked names. A list of names with schedules that cover night and day and a list with schedules that only cover the day from early morning to late evening. Guards and staff, he assumes. Only a list at the back of the folder marks it as something other than what a particularly nosy paparazzi might dig up. The list details every security feature in the house right down to the brand, version, and location of the cameras.

“Was I wrong?” Romanoff draws his attention back to her, looks at him with narrowing eyes. “I can ask someone else if you’re not up for it.”

“I am,” he says. “I’m just wondering why you aren’t handling this on your own. It seems like an easy enough task.”

Improbably, his words make her shoulders drop and the hard lines melt away. She leans back, the gun at the small of her back bumps against the chair with a muted clonk. “The guards are all local and he has live-in staff, none of which deserves to get killed in the crossfire, so backup would be preferable. And handy when it comes to carrying them all outside afterward before we torch the place.”

Bucky almost smirks at that. He’s not there for the kill, he’s there for the heavy lifting. “So, I’m the muscle.”

“Oh, no. Don’t sell yourself short. I need someone who can get into a heavily fortified place, take out guards without raising an alarm, _and_ carry them out afterward.” Her grin is as sharp as ever but there’s warm amusement in her eyes now.

“Right.” He pushes away from the table, goes to the kitchen to refill the coffee press. “I’m regretting this already.”

Her chuckle follows him there. It’s not an unpleasant sound.

 

They spend a few days going over her intel and planning. It’s not till they are gearing up to leave that Bucky realizes that being near Romanoff no longer triggers a fight or flight response in him. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bucky and Natasha go to Chile, teach a Red Room baddie a lesson in home security, and act a tiny bit less asshole-ish towards each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a few lines in Spanish and Russian in this chapter, but I have added translations as hover text and notes at the end of the chapter.

Natasha likes traveling. It’s a requirement for her job, has been since she graduated as a Black Widow, but she genuinely likes it. When she’s stuck in one place for more than a few weeks she gets restless. There is a sort of comfort in seeing the surroundings change around her. It’s relaxing. Meditative.

She lets Barnes drive the car that her contact has left for them in Santiago. He’s been fidgeting all the way from New York to Chile and it was getting on her nerves, but the driving seems to have calmed him down. He handles the traffic with ease and looks almost relaxed behind the wheel. Good. They are supposed to look like two tourists on their way to do some hiking in the mountains around El Arrayan. Tourists relax and enjoy themselves; they don’t stare holes in people’s back or bicker about appearances.

Once they hit the outskirts of Santiago, Natasha reaches between the seats for the backpack stashed there to dig out a paperback, puts her feet up on the dashboard, and begins to read.

A moment later Barnes clears his throat. Does it again when she fails to react.

She puts a finger between the pages she was reading, closes the book around it, and looks over at him. “What?”

He glances over at her and makes a point of looking up and down her bare legs from worn jean shorts to a pair of scuffed hiking boots resting on the right-most corner of the dash. “Do you know what happens to your legs if the airbag goes off?”

She’s getting car safety instructions from the guy who shot her tires out the first time she met him and ripped the steering wheel out the car she was in the second time. Who says the leopard can’t change his spots. She’s not sure he’s ready to understand why this is so amusing to her so she hides her smile, says in light and sweet tone, “Are you going to crash this car to teach me a lesson about car safety?”

“Of course not.” He sounds offended by the suggestion.

Natasha reaches over to pat a thigh that tenses under her touch. “Then you don’t need to worry about my legs.”

A minute passes without any snappy comebacks. Two. She picks up the book and starts reading again when Barnes says, “I see why Steve likes you so much.” He makes it sound like it’s a grievous failing on her behalf.

She tucks the bookmark in between pages she hasn’t turned since she opened the book, lays it flat on her thighs, and looks at him. “Because I’m a plucky go-getter?”

“Because you’re a reckless asshole. Like he is.” The pitch of his voice is gloomy, each word tied down with lead-weights. In perfect contrast to her light and airy one.

It makes her grin. “Aw,” she says. “You do like me, after all.”

He snorts derisively, but there’s a smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

To her abject horror, Natasha realizes she _likes_ talking with him. Barnes has a dry sense of humor that compliments her own, and he doesn’t mind being the straight guy for her dad jokes. But more than anything he is extremely observant and sharp as a razor when he puts his mind to something.

He could make a good partner for future ops if he could remove that four-foot stick he has up his ass.

Natasha takes her legs down from the dash, twists in her seat to keep him in her field of vision without having to turn her head. “Did you teach Steve to box?” Steve is a safe topic and it’s more fun than shoptalk.

“Did he say that?”

“It was in a folder they gave out at the Smithsonian exhibit on Cap. It was very informative.”

“If by informative you mean riddled with mistakes, then sure.”

Interesting. That exhibition ended before Barnes returned to the States, that meant he’d gone to see it before he left. She wants to question him about what he did after he and Steve crashed into the Pontiac. If it really was him who dragged Steve out. But there’s a tick in his jaw that tells her that he already thinks he’s said too much. “Maybe you can clear something up for me, then?”

“What?”

“What year are you born in? The exhibit had 1916 and 1917 as your birth year, so which one is it?

He glances over at her with an incredulous look on his face. “Didn’t you read the files you dumped onto the internet?”

Not all of them, only the interesting ones. Barnes had ended with his fall despite Hydra’s involvement in his later life and that told Natasha all she needed to know about the odds for the rest of the file being genuine. “Maybe I prefer to get it directly from the horse’s mouth.”

“1917 and yeah, I did teach him. What’s it to you?”

The truth is that she mostly asked to keep him talking, but it’s not the whole truth. She’s curious about the life he and Steve led before the war and Steve rarely talks about it. And she has wondered about how Steve’s fighting skills have evolved. There’s discipline to it that doesn’t come from street fighting or from skills picked up in the heat of battle. There’s also, to put it bluntly, a few blind spots that she has worked hard to eradicate with varied success. “I’m just wondering who to blame for his abysmal lack of self-defense when it comes to his legs,” Natasha says because being blunt seems to work better than being nice.

He scoffs. “Why’d you think Stark gave him the shield, to begin with? Besides, boxing doesn’t teach you how.”

Stark. As in Howard Stark, since Tony hadn’t born yet back then. It’s funny how a mere seventy years can change the context.

She shrugs. “Rules are meant to be broken.”

Barnes turns his head to stare at her, frowns, then shakes his head and returns his attention to the road ahead. “Not all of them,” he says when she’s about to ask him what is wrong.

And there it is again. James Buchanan Barnes – law-abiding citizen. Well, maybe not law-abiding, he is on a kill mission with her. James Buchanan Barnes – complex human being sounds better anyway. She likes that version better, too.

 

When they get near Petrov’s estate, Barnes pulls the car over and gets out, leaving her to drive the rest of the way while he disappears into the greenery. The guardhouse comes into view a short while after and she flips the newly installed switch that cuts off the fuel to the engine. A yard or two past the guardhouse the car sputters and dies. Natasha grabs her sunglasses and slips on her tourist persona like she would a jacket.

"Ey! No se puede estacionar acá! Váyase!" the guard yells in Spanish, waving her away, as she opens the car door.

She gets out, says, “Auto… no funciona?” in broken Spanish, swears in English and turns around to dig in her backpack in the back seat while making sure to present her shorts-clad ass to the guard.

It’s a cheap trick but it works. The guard is busy ogling her ass when she turns around with a worn guidebook in hand. “Necesito ayuda,” she pleads, mangling her accent with a heavy American drawl. “Por favor,” Natasha adds, then flips through the book in a pretend search and finishes with, “Problemas con el auto,” pointing to said auto as if the guard won’t understand why she’s asking for help otherwise.

The guard looks at her from his little guardhouse with bulletproof glass, surveillance camera, and easy access to the alarm. He makes the mistake of believing what he thinks he sees. He sees a high ponytail, shorts, sunglasses, and hiking boots, he thinks tourist, wannabe hiker, and he leaves the safe confines of his guardhouse to help her. It’s an easy mistake to make. He doesn’t see the syringe filled with a sedative in her hand before it’s too late and she has it in his neck.

The guard goes limp before he can call for help. He collapses over her shoulder when she bends to take his weight. A tug on his arm shifts his unconscious body into a fireman’s carry. He’s still heavy enough to make her grunt as she stands.

The sound of metal against metal has her forget every ounce of the unconscious guard across her shoulders. Natasha has her gun in her hand and aimed at a face on the other side of the car before she realizes the origin of that sound. Metal fingers tapping against a metal car roof.

“Looks like you don’t need my help after all,” Barnes says ignoring the unwavering gun aimed at a spot between his eyes.

Natasha likes changes, she doesn’t like surprises. Especially not when working. _What the hell_ , she doesn’t say. _How the fuck did you just materialize out nowhere_ , she doesn’t say. “Did you at least do your job before you wandered over here to mouth off?” she says instead.

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” He snaps off a sharp salute for an extra flourish. “The camera is disabled, and the gate is opening as we speak.”

She doesn’t answer him, dumps the unconscious guard in the backseat, and holsters her gun before zip-tying the guard’s hand and feet together, stuffs a gag in his mouth for good measure.

Though there isn’t a sound to give him away, Barnes is moving across the street when she looks up. He moves with less swagger than when he was the Winter Soldier, but the absence of sound makes it look eerie. He’s not a small man, to begin with, and with the added weight of his left arm, he usually walks with audible footsteps. Not so while out on a mission apparently. Natasha gets into the car, flips the fuel switch, and files away for later the desire to find out which mode of waking comes naturally to him and which is a conscious choice.

With the gate now fully open, she drives the car up the winding private road, stops when it’s out of sight from the street.

The mansion glows in the twilight. The light is on in nearly every room despite it only holding a handful of guards, a live-in housekeeper, and Petrov himself. She and Barnes keep in contact via coms and sweep the grounds and leaves the two guards they find tied up and unconscious before they enter the mansion. As Barnes said when they were planning the op, she could easily have handled it on her own and he was right. It is a simple job and while it is nice to have someone else to do the quite literal heavy lifting, it’s not the primary reason he’s with her.

Natasha has fought the Winter Soldier on two separate occasions, though the first time can barely be called a fight. Not one of her shots had landed while he had left her with a gut-wound. The second time around she had put up a better fight, yet he had again left her bleeding while she had only managed to piss him off. She knows the Winter Soldier was a lethal combatant, is the point, with weapons or without. What she wants to find out is how much of that Barnes has retained now that he has a conscience. And if their sparring fight taught her anything, it is this: Barnes can be just as dangerous as the Soldier, but he is a lot more fun to fight.

They move through the house like a pair of ghosts. Again, Barnes moves with a purpose akin to that of the Winter Soldier, like a hunter stalking his prey. He is better than she had hoped, able to sneak up on alert guards with ease she hasn’t seen since her time in the Red Room. With the ground floor swept and the guards and housekeeper dealt with, they climb the stairs to where Petrov spends most of his evenings. The staircase opens up to a wide landing and they turn left towards the study and the library, away from the bedrooms. Before they get very far, Barnes holds up his hand for her to stop walking and tilts his head. She’s about to ask what he’s doing when he cups his ear with one hand to mimic listening. Natasha stills and listens as hard as she can. There’s an air-conditioner whirring somewhere behind them, a fire crackling a few rooms away. Then she hears it. Something hard clicking against the tiled floor. Multiple somethings. A dog and not a small one. A shuffling human footstep follows behind. Annoyance claws at her and she reaches for the nearest door half a second after Barnes.

The room is pitch dark but the light from the corridor reveals a polished floor of black marble, thick veins that flow from one tile to the next. Reflective surfaces on the walls and a smell of soap tells her that it’s a bathroom before her eyes adjust to the darkness and let her identify the usual trappings of an upper-class bathroom. Great. They are hiding in the john because Petrov has a dog that the surveillance somehow hasn’t revealed. Sloppy and unacceptable. Natasha will have to have a talk with her contact about what is and what isn’t good work ethics.

Despite the ample room to move, Barnes puts himself between her and the door. His back is pressed against her – a solid wall of muscles keeping her trapped against the cool tiles of the wall. It takes her a second or two to realize that he’s not trapping her there, he’s shielding her. If the person following the dog enters the bathroom, they won’t see her, they’ll only see him.

It’s sweet and annoying at the same time.

She pushes against his shoulder with the back of her free hand and he shifts, leaving her with an inch or two, so she pushes harder. That makes Barnes turn his head towards her. There’s not enough light to let her see his expression, but she’s willing to bet he’s frowning.

“Stop. Crowding. Me,” she whispers so quietly that she can barely hear the words herself.

He hears it just fine. He shifts, leaving her with enough room to aim her gun at the door, too. Finally.

Natasha narrows her focus to the approaching duo, forces her body to relax so she won’t make a sound for the sensitive ears of the dog to hear. Why did there have to be a dog? Dogs can’t be as easily manipulated as humans. They make noises when upset or angry and they can’t be persuaded to shut up with reasoning or threats. It will have to be put down if it becomes a threat, which goes directly against the goal of having minimal casualties. This is a kill mission, but Natasha would prefer not to have to kill a dog for doing its job, thank you very much.

The click of nails against tiles comes nearer. They stop right outside the door. Dammit. The shuffling steps continue past the door, then they stop, too. It has to be Petrov. Everything about the gait says old man, from the shuffling to the asthmatic breathing.

A voice brittle with age confirms Natasha’s suspicion. “Ко мне,” Petrov orders the dog.

The dog whines instead of obeying. Doesn’t move away from the door.

“Фу! Ко мне!” The voice is harder now. 

Again, the dog stays where it is instead of coming over to its master. Then it paws at the door.

When she nudges Barnes this time he steps aside readily. Glad she doesn’t have to remind her that this is her kill not his, Natasha moves to stand near the door, holds her gun so it’ll be the first thing anyone opening the door will see, and signals to Barnes to keep an eye on the dog.

He acknowledges her instruction with a nod and takes a half step back while keeping his unwavering aim at the level of Petrov’s head through the door.

Outside, Petrov grumbles and shuffles closer to the door. Predictably, he opens it. Just as predictably, he gapes at the gun instead of calling for help.

“Don’t,” Natasha says, her voice calm and even despite the rush of blood in her ears. “There’s no one left to hear you.”

It’s different seeing him in person than in pictures. Photos don’t conjure up the smell of old sweat and blood and fear the way flesh and blood does. She can’t allow the anger burning in her throat like saltwater to take hold of her. She’s not doing this as revenge for what was done to her in the Red Room. If it was that, she’ll never be able to stop again. She’s doing it for all the young women that never walked out of that place again. The ones who were killed by trainers or other students, the ones who were damaged and broken by the training and put down like animals because of it.

“Нет,” Petrov says, his voice unsteady. He holds up the book in his hand like a shield. Good. He deserves to be frightened. He deserves to be dead along with the other architects of the Red Room.

Natasha tsks, says, “I know you speak English.”

Petrov is a man used to having power over people, used to being obeyed. Putting a gun in his face will only do so much. She needs more than that to keep him unbalanced and an easy way to do that is to push him out of his comfort zone. It’s the little things, like forcing him to speak a foreign language and flashing him a smile that looks like it has been cut with a razor.

“Black Widow,” Petrov manages to get out, his Russian accent thick like a B-movie villain. “What are you…”

“I’m just here to talk with you, Yegor Ignatov. Nothing more,” Natasha lies. She needs to separate him from the dog to keep the dog from panicking when its master is killed. Petrov is going to die; the dog doesn’t have to.

Barnes opens the door all the way, says to the dog, “Hey now, what’s the matter, boy?” when it starts to whine again. The dog wags its tail in a hesitant greeting.

She watches Petrov’s jaw go slack as he takes in the metal arm, his eyes dart from Barnes to her and back again before they settle on her. It’s an unexpected reaction. Maybe Petrov had done more than think up ways to brainwash young women.

“Молодец,” Barnes murmurs and crouches down to offer the back of his human hand for the dog to sniff.

“Now we’re going for a little walk while the Winter Soldier will stay here with your dog.” She doesn’t have to see Barnes’ expression to know he isn’t pleased with the change of plans. She’s leaving him to dog-sit while she completes the op.

Plans change. He will have to learn to move with the times anyway.

Natasha gestures with her gun to get Petrov moving and he obeys without protest, slowly and with a limp to one leg and a stiff shoulder. The years haven’t been kind to him. He looks like he can feel the weight of every single one of them pressing down on him. The kind thing to do would be to send him to jail instead of killing him. But he doesn’t deserve kindness. This man thought up ways to rob young women of their humanity. Ways to break their minds and to leave them deadly but loyal. Even now, he can’t even muster being kind to a dog.

Petrov might never have laid a hand on Natasha personally, but the methods he formulated shaped her for years. Made her someone else, someone heartless for a while, someone colder forever. Acts like that need to be paid for.

Once they reach the study, she motions for Petrov to sit the wing chair in front of the fireplace, closes the door behind them while he has his back to her. The door isn’t soundproof, but between it and the suppressor on her gun, the sound should be dampened enough not to spook the dog.

The study has wood paneling on the walls up to about chest height, a single painting is hanging behind a giant mahogany desk. The painting is of a young Petrov in uniform with a chest about as inflated as his ego. What’s considerably more interesting than the painting is the half-inch of air between it and the wall. She will have to check it for a hidden safe once she’d done with Petrov. On the desk in front of it is a laptop. This is somewhat surprising, but Natasha comes prepared. She slips out a USB flash drive with a cloning program preloaded and walks over to the computer.

“You two invade my home. Kill my bodyguards,” Petrov says breaking the silence. “I am not naïve, Black Widow. Revenge will not change the past.”

She inserts the USB drive into the computer and walks over to him, leans against the warm marble framing the fireplace. “I never said I killed them.”

There is a reading lamp by the chair, it shows her a face littered with liver spots. The blue of his irises has turned watery grey, yellow all around, but the ice behind them is still there. “This is why we did what we did. Feelings make you soft.”

“This has nothing to do with feeling. There is no reason to kill people for taking an ill-advised job.”

Decades ago, a little while before she graduated to become a Black Widow, Petrov had been given a tour of the Red Room along with other important men in suits. She and a few other trainees had been sparring in the gym when the men had entered, and they had been instructed to continue while the men watched. Her sparring partner had been unnerved by the attention, but Natasha had known it for what it was: an opportunity to impress. And she had impressed them. She had been singled out afterward and the men had asked her questions before the men left. Petrov had looked at her then like he did now – with detached interest.

She shifts her finger from the trigger guard to the trigger.

“How long have you two worked together now?” Petrov asks, changing the subject with the hope to delay the inevitable no doubt.

“Long enough.” She smiles at him, too wide and too full of teeth to be comfortable to look at. “There’s a sort of irony to that. Don’t you think? Hydra’s and the Red Room’s greatest assets working with Captain America to fight evil.”

He doesn’t seem to agree. Petrov lets out a sigh, and says, “Nothing lasts forever. Do what you came here for.”

This wish, Natasha is willing to grand him. She pulls the trigger, collects the USB drive and the documents she finds in the hidden safe and doesn’t spare a single glance at the body slumped in the chair.

Barnes waits for her by the stairs. He has managed to find a leash for the dog, and it is sitting obediently by his side.

“Alright,” she says. “Let’s burn this place to the ground.”

 

* * *

 

They watch the flames take hold of the building in silence. Romanoff hasn’t said a word in more than twenty minutes and Bucky hasn’t been able to come up with anything clever to say to break the spell the old man apparently put on her. Before Petrov turned up, she had been the embodiment of danger. Shifting from looking like a confused tourist to a focused operative in a blink of an eye. It had been deeply fascinating to watch. She makes it look natural in a way he can never hope to match. It ought to fill him with jealousy. It doesn’t. It fills him with awe.

Except now she seems distracted.

If she were Steve, he’d ask her what’s wrong. Or more likely tell her to cheer the fuck up. But she’s not. She’s Natasha Romanoff, an Avenger, the right hand of Fury, and probably the last face he will ever see if he fucks up his quest for redemption. So, he keeps his trap shut. The only time he speaks is when he orders the dog to stay with the knocked-out guards and housekeeper. Seeing it curl up next to the housekeeper makes him feel better about leaving it behind.

When they get to the car, he takes the driver’s seat again. Romanoff gets into the passenger’s seat without a word.

After a few minutes of driving the silence becomes too much for him. Bucky glances over at her and says, “Are you okay?”

The answer comes without hesitation. “I’m fine.”

Of course, she is. Right as rain. God forbid, she has feelings for once. “Right,” is all he says and reminds himself again that she’s not Steve. She’s ten times as annoying.

She sighs. Rubs a hand over her face. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day,” she says as if that explains the brooding silence.

“Forget I asked.”

She turns in her seat to watch him as she did on the way out. He glances back at her, does his best to convey his heartfelt desire for her to stop treating him like he’s an animal at the zoo. It fails to have any effect whatsoever. Fan-fucking-tastic. So, Bucky deals with it the only way he knows how to. He doesn’t fidget or swallow or anything stupid like that. He keeps his attention on driving and does his best to ignore her.

Eventually, Romanoff asks, “What do you know about the Red Room?”

Too much and not enough. He knows that they trained some of the world’s best spies. He knows that when she’d mentioned it at the get-together at the Tower, he’d felt like the floor opened underneath him and he’d become weightless for a heart-stopping second. He doesn’t know why but that’s nothing new, he can’t explain why most of his panic attacks happen. They just do. Steve shuffling a pack of playing cards had done it on one memorable occasion.

“Not much,” he says. “It’s where they made you.”

“The Red Room Academy was founded by Leviathan. That guy was one of its architects.” Her tone is flat and lifeless.

So, that had been her connection to Petrov. He hadn’t just been some evil bureaucrat with loose ties to her past. He had been one of the people responsible for fucking her up in the first place. Bucky understands revenge. Even more so, the dissatisfaction afterward when the bastards are dead, and you’re still stuck with the damage and the nightmares and the utter shitshow your life has turned into. “Revenge isn’t nearly as sweet as Hollywood would have you believe.”

She turns away from him, shifts her focus to the road ahead. “It wasn’t for revenge. They broke a lot of people before they made me. Young women who didn’t deserve it. Petrov will never be able to harm another living soul,” she says, and Bucky can’t help but notice the distinction she makes between herself and the other students.

So, he’s not the only one of the two prone to self-flagellation. That’s good to know. They should form a club, force Steve to join and make him the treasurer since he’s the only one of them who can be trusted. “But you deserved it?” he says.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t deny it either.”

“Have you considered a career as a parking inspector. You’re just the right kind of annoying for it to work.” Normally – if such a term can be used to describe this – when she sprouts shit like that, she does it with a hint of amusement. Now her voice remains flat.

Bucky takes a second to reconsider his choices, says, “Steve told me I shot you,” anyway. It’s the one thing he can think of to say to snap her out of this bout of self-pity.

Her head whips around, a frown barely visible in the faint lights from the dashboard creases her brow.

“Actually, no,” he amends. “He didn’t tell me, I forced it out of him after I watched the shitty handheld recording of me doing my best to kill you, Steve, and Wilson.” Bucky’s mouth is dry, but nothing, nothing is going to stop him from saying what he has to say. “Funny thing is, Steve thought I was talking about Odessa instead of DC when I mentioned it.” He grins. Or he tries to, he is too tense to do anything but grimace. “And that’s how I found out that I tried to kill you, Steve, and Wilson two times each. Makes for a nice, even number, doesn’t it?” He almost pulls off a cheerful tone. Almost.

“Barnes.” Her voice is low. Barely audible above the engine of the car.

He has already jumped off the cliff, nothing she says is gonna keep him from sticking the landing. “How come I get a free pass from the people I tried to kill, while you still lug around the guilt from being sent to that hellhole?”

“I volunteered. KGB wasn’t enough for me, so I signed up for the Red Room because I knew they made the deadliest assassins in the world. I wanted it. You didn’t even have a choice.”

“You don’t carry grudges, but guilt lasts forever, huh?”

Her head dips, and she mumbles something he doesn’t catch.

“What?”

“Nothing lasts forever,” she repeats in a far-off tone of voice.

He’s not going to be derailed that easily. “I signed up to go to be a soldier. Even without the propaganda, I’d sure as shit have a pretty good idea of what that entailed. I was ready and fucking willing to go to another continent and kill people as my patriotic duty. I can’t imagine your situation was any different.”

Natasha sighs, says, “Pep talks works a lot better when they’re not littered with swear words.”

“Fuck off,” Bucky says and smiles. Huffs out a laugh when she flips him off as an answer.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate this—” she gestures between them “—impromptu therapy session you’re so hooked on having. But I’m not guilt-tripping. I’m trying to figure something out.”

It’s good news. Getting into a pissing contest about who has most to atone for with someone with a past as littered with corpses as his own is stupid anyway. “What?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know when I do,” she says, somehow managing to not sound like a condescending asshole.

“Fine. You brood in silence, just don’t expect me to act all chipper and shit.”

She laughs and he decides he really likes the sound of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations for the Spanish and Russian lines:  
> Ey! No se puede estacionar acá! Váyase!: Hey! You can't park here! Go away!  
> Auto… no funciona: Car... doesn't work?  
> Necesito ayuda: I need help.  
> Por favor: Please.  
> Problemas con el auto: Problems with the car.
> 
> Ко мне: Come (here).  
> Фу: Don’t do that/Stop.  
> Нет: No.  
> Молодец: Good boy.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha and Bucky goes over the content Natasha stole from Petrov's safe and they talk like actual adults. Bonus: A throw pillow looking like a miniature Captain America's shield makes its first appearance - crafters gonna craft.

“What I don’t get is how he recognized me,” Barnes says. “It’s probably nothing, but it just bugs me.”

Natasha looks up from the notebook she’s been trying to decipher. They have been going over the content she stole from Petrov’s safe for the past couple of hours now. Barnes’ dinner table is littered with them. The documents range from what she would expect to find in a rich man’s safe – property titles and financial records – to the suspicious kind – three sets of expertly forged identity documents and notebooks written in a cipher she’s yet to crack. Her head is stuck in decoder mode and it takes her a few seconds to realize that he is talking about Petrov’s reaction to him. So, she hadn’t been the only one who’d noticed it. “Your arm is pretty recognizable. Not a lot of people walking around with a prosthetic arm that advanced.”

“But that’s just it, he wasn’t looking at my arm, he was looking at my face.” He gets up, grimaces, and mutters, “Jesus,” while rolling his shoulders before he takes the empty coffee press to the kitchen for a refill.

Ever since they left Petrov’s estate last night, Natasha has had a nagging feeling she overlooked something. Having Barnes echo the sentiment should be a comfort, but it only confirms that she needs to find the source of it. Petrov had brought up Barnes twice when they talked. At the time it hadn’t seemed odd to her. Barnes is far more intimidating than her. Of course, Petrov worried about him, too. But Barnes had read Petrov’s reaction as recognition and there’s no denying that he might be right.

Natasha had hoped to find something to confirm that she’s not overthinking it. Something concrete to back up her gut feeling. She had hoped to be able to mull it over before she had to share it with anyone. It looks like she’s not going to get that wish granted. Closing the notebook, she says, “I think I missed something. I talked with Petrov in his study. I thought he was taunting me about what they did to me in the Red Room, but I don’t think that was it.” It has been decades since she left the Red Room, but admitting mistakes still feels disquieting. Like giving him a knife and baring her throat for him to cut it.

He pours fresh coffee for both of them, and says, “Walk me through it.”

And she does. She recounts everything she and Petrov said during their brief conversation. Word by word, while Barnes questions her about inflections and body language. It feels like a debrief. He’s as thorough as Fury on his best days. Even if nothing new comes to light from it, he picks up on Petrov mentioning him twice, too. That cements the need to look into Petrov’s connection with Hydra for her.

When they are done, he stares down at the table with a frown, then says, “I don’t know. It might be something…” He unfurls his long fingers from around his coffee cup, gestures palm up at the piles of documents.

Biting down disappointment, Natasha doesn’t wait for him to continue speaking. “But it might also be me overanalyzing it, since all that careful surveillance managed to miss a guard dog.”

He folds his arms across his chest, flesh over silver, but he looks more amused than exasperated. “That’s not what I was going to say. And the dog was new. There was a cardboard box with bowls and food and shit in the pantry. Most of the bowls still had price stickers on them.”

In a sickly-sweet tone that doesn’t match her flash of relief, she says, “I’m sorry. What were you going to say?”

Barnes rolls his eyes theatrically and says, “That we can’t ask him now, and it might be better to look at what we do have. Maybe look into if there’s any connection between him and Hydra.”

He has a point and both his suggestions line up with Natasha’s own plans. “Alright, smartass, but I’m going to need some of my own things if I’m to have any chance of deciphering this.” She thumps the notebook. “None of the ciphers I know by heart work.”

“Didn’t know you were a quitter, Widow.” The words sound like a rebuke, but the glimmer in his eyes tells a different story.

“It’s called tactical regroup, _Soldier_. You should look into it,” she fires back in the chipper tone that usually makes him side-eye her.

This time it makes him answer in his own version of annoyingly chipper, “Thanks! I will.” He rolls his shoulders, pulls a face like that was a mistake. “I could do with a break, anyway.” Straightening in his seat, Barnes twists his upper body around first to the left and then to the right. Cartilage creaks in both directions. Natasha watches in quiet fascination as he proceeds to wrap his arm over his head, grasps the side of his skull, and pulls until his neck pops. Most cats don’t look as content when stretching as he does.

The contentment fades when he notices her looking. Then he shrugs in a what-are-you-gonna-do gesture.

She leans back in her chair, crosses her arms over her chest. “You never called Mary-Anne, did you?”

“Who?” he says with earnest confusion.

“The massage therapist. I texted you her name, phone number, email. Even the address to her website.”

He rubs a hand over his neck but continues to hold her gaze without flinching. “Yeah, about that.”

“You’re as bad as Clint.” She should have guessed he wouldn’t follow up on it. His need for privacy rivals her own. And what’s more, it can be terrifying to let a stranger touch you when the only contact you are used to happens during sparring or actual fights. Steve is a hugger, but he can’t make up for decades of violence. Natasha has two choices: Do nothing and watch Barnes's discomfort grow until he won't be able to move. Or she can offer him help on the off chance that he might accept it. “Alright, how about this: If you tell me where you got that throw pillow,” she points at his couch and the ridiculous miniature Captain America shield pillow, “I’ll give you a back rub.” She says it like she’s joking to give him an out. If she’s pushing him too far, he can laugh and turn her down without having to say no.

The easy friendliness on his face is replaced by a look of complete neutrality. She can almost hear the gears grinding inside his head as he weighs the pros and cons. Then he licks his lips, says, “I got it off some website with all kinds of handmade crap.” He shrugs. “I still have the email. I’ll send you the details.”

Natasha smiles at him and takes care to keep it small and friendly. “Can’t wait.” She stands and stretches her arms.

He stands, too, pulling at the bottom of his tee to straighten it or more likely to give him something to do. “Where do you want me?” He glances around the living room before he returns to not quite looking at her.

“Right where you are. Turn the chair around and sit on it backward.”

“Gr—Right.” Barnes sounds relieved. What had he expected? It’s not like she carries a massage table with her and he’s too long to lie flat on the couch.

“You can rest your arms on the table if you want.” She considers dragging a chair over to sit on while she massages him, but even sitting down he’s ridiculously tall. Working on his shoulders while seated will get uncomfortable. “Keep the tee on. I somehow forgot to bring my bag of massage oils.”

He huffs a quiet laugh and does as instructed. His left arm catches the light with a dull gleam, the panels shift as he leans forward to fold his arms on top of the table. Would it be room temperature or as warm as the rest of his body if she touched it? “I’m going to touch you now,” Natasha says and moving to stand behind him. She's about to lay her hands on his shoulders when he turns his head to look at her.

The look he shoots her is incredulous. “That was kind of the point, wasn’t it?”

She forces down the urge to flick his ear and grasps his head with both hands to turn it away from her. “Tell me if it’s too much. Or if it hurts in any way. It’s not supposed to hurt. Sore is fine, but stop me if it becomes painful.”

“You worry too much,” Barnes says, and he has a point.

But the thing is, she’s never worked on anyone with modifications before. Worrying is perfectly reasonable. The thing is, he’s an ass and she tells him to shut up. He does with a chuckle, but he keeps quiet after that.

Despite all his brave words, he flinches when Natasha puts her hands flat on his shoulders. She keeps them still to allow him to get used to the touch, begins by rubbing her thumbs up and down the back of his neck. His skin is warm, almost startling so, and the muscles hard underneath it. She works on his right shoulder first; the left needs more work than the right and she wants him to get used to having her hands on him before she tackles it. Massaging him through his tee is a little more difficult than oiled-up skin, but the fabric is thin enough for it to work.

Barnes flinches again when she touches his left shoulder. Maybe it hadn’t been her touching him that made him flinch in the first place, maybe it was the specific area. She shifts her hand closer to his neck, works the part of the trapezoid away from the scar tissue. “Does it hurt with I touch the scar?”

“No. It’s…” he shrugs the shoulder she isn’t touching. “Oversensitive, I guess. The nerves are bunched up or something.”

None of that sounds comfortable. “Should I keep away from it?”

“No, it’s fine. Just don’t use your nails on it or anything crazy like that.”

He tips his head forward and Natasha takes it as an invitation to gently rub the back of his neck, down his left shoulder and up again. This time he doesn’t flinch. Instead, he lets his shoulders drop a little with what she suspects is an active attempt to relax. The muscles are rock hard but now that he’s no longer so tense, she might have a chance to work the knots out of them. Using both hands, she maintains the gentle, continual stroking from neck to shoulder, increasing the pressure gradually. “Alright, I promise not to scratch your back bloody,” she says dryly.

“You say that now,” he drawls, his shoulder droopy under her hands.

She bites her lip not to laugh, leans forward, and lets her tone turn sulky. “Only if you ask me nicely.”

Barnes makes a sound somewhere between a strangled laugh and a death rattle. His ears turn red and it’s the greatest thing she has ever seen. The Winter Soldier was one of the most dangerous men she has ever encountered. James Buchanan Barnes is even more dangerous now that he has his mind back under his control. This dangerous man, this sarcastic and private man, blushes when she flirts with him. Blushes. It’s a startlingly human reaction and the only thing that keeps Natasha from pushing for more is his lack of verbal response. He’s trusting her by letting her massage him and it’s a trust she has worked hard to gain. The polite thing to do would be to stop teasing him. The polite thing to do would be to call him by his first name instead of his last.

James’ head dips lower and lower as she works her way down his back. He looks like he’s falling asleep. His breathing, deep and even, only reinforces this. She had only intended to give him a shoulder rub to ease the discomfort and set him up with a series of stretches. Maybe dangle the prospect of some reward if he seemed unwilling to follow her advice. She hadn’t expected him to like it this much. (She hadn’t expected herself to like it.) Her fingers are numb from rubbing over the fabric, but she keeps it up. With numb fingers and sore arms, she works her way down his back, turning stone into flesh and bones.

Her arms are burning by the time decides that enough is enough. Rome wasn’t built in one day; years of tension and Hydra-made modifications can’t be undone in one session. And, really, she needs to get moving. She can’t spend the rest of the day massaging James’ back no matter how docile it makes him. She slides her hands up along either side of his spine to rest them on his shoulders and squeezes. “Up and at ‘em, Soldier.”

To allow him time to center himself again, Natasha walks around the table and begins to sort the documents. When she looks up again, he’s rolling his shoulders with a look of contentment on his face.

“Oh God, that was…” James trails off, rolls his head and for once there’s no tension in the lines of his face. Not even when he wraps long fingers around the side of his skull and pulls, slow and steady, to pop his neck. Pure serenity. “Thank you.” He says it with a wide easy smile that she has only seen in photographs from before he fell. It’s mesmerizing this close.

She has red in her ledger, it doesn’t matter that none of the blood in it is his. Her debt is for the pain she caused and if she can take even a little of his away, it is worth numb fingers and sore arms. But she can’t tell him that. It’s too honest for whatever this push-and-pull relationship they have developed. “It’s nothing,” she says instead with a shrug and a tone of voice that reveals nothing.

He laughs a little, but his eyes are clear and open, closer to gray than blue in the artificial light. “You want a beer? We could… we could make a battle plan for how to deal with the intel.”

She wants to crack the cipher used in those notebooks. She wants to keep working. (She wants time for herself to figure out what made massaging James feel so different from massaging Clint.) But she has worked too hard on gaining James’ trust to leave now. “Okay,” Natasha says. “One beer, then I need to go.”

* * *

“Where did you learn how to do that? I can’t imagine the Red Room had wellness classes,” Bucky asks a while later. The beer in his hand is his third, but he can’t feel them, courtesy of the knock-off brand of Super Soldier Serum Zola used on him. He still likes the taste, though, it relaxes him as it did when alcohol had an influence on him. The company doesn’t hurt either.

“Ha!” Natasha says with a smile that looks more bitter than amused. “No. No, they did not. They did teach me where all the soft spots are, where the least amount of pressure causes the most pain. So, I tend to avoid doing that.”

He recognizes the bitter rage in her voice. It makes him feel less alone. “Glad to know that. Ya know, _after_ you spend half an hour working me over.”

She flips him off with a brilliant and very fake smile, leans back on the couch, and takes a sip of her beer. “Clint is an idiot when it comes to listening to his body, too. If I wanted a functioning partner in the field, I had to be able to help him.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. It felt good to be able to use my hands to do good for once. To use all those anatomy lessons in the Red Room for more than being an effective killer.” She shifts her focus to the label on the beer bottle, inserts a nail under one corner and pulls a strip of paper off the bottle, balls it up, and starts on the next corner. She might as well have started biting her nails.

“Coulda used someone like you with the Commandos. All that sleeping on the ground or on field beds. We all sounded like old men in the morning,” Bucky says to distract her from the admission of having actual feelings.

Natasha shoots him a glance he can’t decipher. “Even if I’d been born then, I don’t think the US was fond of women soldiers. American or not.”

He shrugs. “Didn’t stop Carter. I’m sure you’d made them make an exception.”

Another indecipherable look. “If she was anything like Sharon, then I believe you.” Natasha puts down her beer and picks up the shield pillow with a look of amused disgust. “This is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I need at least five of them.”

Bucky stifles a laugh but doesn’t manage to keep the smile off his face. “Well, if it’s that important to you.” He digs out his phone and scrolls through his emails, finds the one with the seller’s info, copies it, and texts it to her. “If you really wanna get under Steve’s skin, pretend you didn’t get it just to annoy him.”

Her smile is wide and vicious. “I like the way you think. Have Sam seen it yet?” she asks and continues when he shakes his head. “He’d be easy to talk into getting one, too. Same with Sharon and Tony. Maybe Maria if I bribe her. Clint’s par for the course.”

“You’re a monster, lady,” he says with approval, “but you forgot the lounge in the Tower. Maybe you could get Stark to embed trackers so Steve can’t make them disappear.”

She sighs, puts a hand over her heart. “It warms my heart that despite everything you’ve been through, you still find it in you to torment him.”

He takes a swig out of his beer to drown a chuckle. “It’s the least I can do after he let me finish every single fight he started as a kid. Which I can tell you, were a lot.”

Snickering, Natasha puts the pillow down on the couch between them, patting it like you would a dog. “Now that’s love.”

There’s no point in denying it. Bucky never had any brothers growing up and nearly everyone he knew back then has died of old age. Steve is all the family he has left. He raises his bottle. “To assholes who don’t know when to quit.”

“I mean, I know a lot of those,” she says with her bottle half raised.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“To assholes who don’t know when to quit and the people putting up with them,” she says, looking like she’s told a joke.

He can’t decide which group she’s included him in, maybe both, or which one she’d include herself in for that matter. “I’ll drink to that.”

They clink bottles and drink.

Natasha breaks the silence by asking, “What did Fury offer you in return for letting Steve find you?”

Bucky has to give her points for phrasing the question as she does. On the plane out of Bucharest, he'd admitted that Fury'd offered him work and she doesn’t waste any time by asking how Steve tracked him down. Instead, she goes straight for his motivation. He doesn’t bother hiding his amused grin. “Why’d you think Steve didn’t find me on his own?”

She leans forward, tapping a finger against her temple. “You see, I have this thing between my ears. It’s called a brain.”

He looks away to keep himself from laughing. “Fury told me that if I'd stop playing hide and seek with Captain America, he might find something for me to do. Let me come back home without having to look over my shoulder all the time. Except with more swear words and fewer promises.”

Natasha purses her lips and says in a dry tone, “That’s some deal. Mine was: ‘You don’t kill us; we won’t kill you.’”

Despite his bad track record for spotting her lies, Bucky turns to study her face. She looks completely honest, but then she’d probably look as honest telling him the moon is made of cheese. Fuck it. As far as he can tell, most of her lies are by omission. He can deal with those by asking straight questions and watching out for what she doesn't say. “You mean you weren’t in on it when you conveniently got us on a flight to the States?”

“I already told you on the plane. I didn’t know anything until Steve called me. Fury isn’t the sharing kind.” She swirls what’s left in her bottle around. At most, there’s a mouthful or two left. There's no way he can talk her into having a fourth beer when she started out only wanting one. 

He wets his lips, says, “You’re a professional liar, darlin’. I didn’t believe a word that came out of that pretty, little mouth of yours,” before she can make an excuse to leave. It’s a Hail Mary play, but he likes this too much not to give it a shot.

She’s silent for several long seconds while her eyes catalog every inch of his face. He overplayed his hand, her painfully neutral expression tells him. Ruined everything after all. Then Natasha begins to laugh, low and husky. “You’re a piece of work, James Buchanan Barnes,” she says. “And don’t worry about it, I still don’t trust anything that passes your pouty lips.”

Bucky chokes on his beer, makes the mistake of looking at her as she winks at him, and spends the next minute relearning how to breathe air instead of beer.

When he can speak again, he says, “I thought Fury’d send you to keep me on the straight and narrow—”

Her phone rings with a cheerful pop song he doesn’t recognize.

The shift in her is instant. She goes from relaxed and smiling to alert and closed off. With an apologetic glance his way, she says, “I need to take this. Sorry.” Digging out her phone, she gets up and answers the phone with, “Pepper. Hi.” A pause then. “Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of something.” Despite the attempt to end the conversation, she keeps talking and leaves the living room for the kitchen.

He gets up, too. Can’t just sit there and wait for her to get back. To give his hands something to do, he begins gathering the files scattered all over his dinner table. The notebooks go in one stack for Natasha to take with her. He’s always been shit at code-cracking, anyway. He slips the other documents into their respective folders and stacks them, too. He continues to fidget with them when Natasha ends the conversation, doesn’t turn around when fabric rubbing against fabric announces that she’s back.

“I should go.” Her tone is apologetic again.

He should tell her to stay for dinner. He should thank her for whatever magic she performed on him that has eased the bone-deep ache and made his body feels heavy and warm. Relaxed for the first time in decades. Bucky turns around, asks “You okay to drive?” to say something.

“Yes, _dad_. It takes more than a couple of beers to get me drunk.”

He chews at his bottom lip.

“I’ll take a cab if it makes you feel better.” There's a lilt to her voice that says it's a joke, but her eyes look dead-serious.

He doesn’t know which signal to respond to, opts for the joke because that one’s easier to deal with. “Don’t want to send you to the poorhouse.”

She snorts at a joke that at most deserves an eye-roll.

They split the documents between them. Natasha gets the notebooks and false identity papers, while Bucky gets the property titles and financial records. Years spend working at a grocer as a kid gave him a good eye for numbers. They barely speak while they sort them. What had felt companionable a few minutes ago now feels awkward. They bump into each other when they both reach for the USB stick.

She picks it up with an apologetic smile. “I have a closed-circuit computer setup, probably better to be safe and not risk bricking your computer.”

He nods as if he understood any of that, says, “Yeah, sure. Have at it.”

The bag packed, Natasha looks at him and says again, “I should go.”

“Yeah.”

He follows her out into the hallway, watches her pull on her jacket and boots, trying to come up with something to say. Finally, when she has her hand on the doorknob, he blurts out, “It felt good to work again. A real job, not a smarmy salesman. Thank you for that.” He rubs a hand over his neck, does his best to smile like a human being instead of a chimpanzee. Or the idiot he is. “And thanks for the back rub.”

There is no doubt in Bucky’s mind that years of spy work help her present him with a smile instead of a look of pity. “Thanks for helping out and for the beers.” Her smile turns sharp. “And for not trying to kill me a third time.”

“Ah, you know what they say. Third time’s the charm. Gotta make it count.”

Natasha snickers. The sound of it lets him breathe again. Keeps him from saying something stupid as she lets herself out and he closes the door behind her.

He stands with his hand on the door till her footsteps disappear down the stairway. Whatever energy he had left drains from him. Maybe he can use that as an excuse for the awkwardness. Zero fuel in the tank. He needs to eat something to keep his body from eating itself, then hit the sack and sleep for a hundred years. Or a few hours. Whichever. Eat. Sleep. Work. It’s a plan and about as detailed as it’s gonna get right now. Onwards and upwards.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha deciphers those notebooks they ~~stole~~ found and she and Bucky travel to Northern Europe to follow up on a lead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a few lines in Finnish in this chapter, but I have added translations as hover text and notes at the end of the chapter.

Hands gripping her hips. Strong hands that can bruise and kill with ease. The right one shakes as the fingers flex and curl. It makes her inexplicably, stupidly happy. Natalia slips her fingers up under a sweater that should be on the floor already, tracing the lines of hard muscles through a tee worn soft with age. How is this fair? Her only clothing is a flimsy nightdress and he’s still fully dressed. She grabs the bottom hem of both shirts and pulls up, forcing him to break the kiss or get a face full of shirts.

He’s reluctant to let go of her and that, too, makes her happy.

Heavy muscles shift and slide as he pulls the two shirts the rest of the way off and discards them.

Half breathless already, his blue eyes knock the remaining breath from her when he looks down at her. She reaches up and tucks a lock of brown hair back behind his ear. “Hi,” she says and bites her lip. “I missed you.”

Love is a fragile concept, not meant to exist within these concrete walls. Natalia doesn’t dare give voice to it out of the fear of losing him. It makes her feel vulnerable for the first time in years. She has something of value to lose now.

Smooth metal fingers cradle her jaw like it is a precious thing. He bends down to kiss her, warm breath wafts over her skin as he says, “I missed you, too.”

 

Natasha wakes with a start and throws the covers off her to escape the feeling of a body – James’ body – pressing against hers. The blackout curtains are closed, but she can see light peeking in around them. She has overslept and is paying for it with a heavy body that wants to return to the comfortable warmth of the bed. Not an option. Especially not with the dream clinging to her. Fleeing into the bathroom, she turns on the cold water in her shower. Maybe it will strip away the ghost of long fingers skimming over her, a heavy and warm body flush against her own. She rests her head against the tiles, stays under the chilly water until her skin puckers with goose flesh and she can no longer feel the ghostly touch.

A brisk drying off stops her shivering, then clothes, and she can almost pretend that the dream didn’t happen. Like most dreams, it is evaporating already, all there’s left of it is a fleeting touch of strong arms— nope. She’s not doing this. Not now, not ever. She has a plan, dammit, and she’s not about to let a juvenile infatuation interfere with it. She and James started this together, it’s only fair he gets to take the next step with her.

Natasha forgoes breakfast and returns to deciphering Petrov’s notebooks with a cup of instant coffee in her hand.

She has been at them since she returned from James’ apartment yesterday. She’s not looking forward to explaining to him that the unbreakable cipher is a simple substitution cipher. That the Black Widow had been stumped by a cipher disc, or as he probably knew it as a child – a secret decoder ring. It’s one of the simplest ciphers there is, a child can construct a cipher disc in minutes. All it takes is two circular pieces of paper, one larger with a plaintext alphabet written along the outer edge, and a smaller disc with the ciphertext likewise along the outer edge. Pin the two together and rotate the smaller disc for a cipher alphabet – A is substituted with K, B with L, and so forth.

Her only excuse for not figuring that out sooner is the lack of a pattern. Petrov used a different setup for the ciphertext for each journal and a random rotation for each entry. Now that she knows what kind of cipher Petrov used, she can test and decipher each journal with a brute force attack. It’s mindless work and it’s straight forward. (Unlike so many other things.)

The notebooks she has already deciphered are stacked in a pile. Each with a handwritten cipher disc stuck to the cover and post-its by each entry with the setting used. Whenever she finds something of interest, she marks the place with a neon green sticky bookmark.

Hours disappear as she works on them. She works until her stomach growls at her, returns to it with a sandwich in her hand. Natasha's back is aching by the time she’s done, but she’s found a few leads. The most likely one concerns a project called Tabula Rasa and it only takes her two phone calls to verify the address and name connected to it.

Time to catch James up to speed.

He picks up on the first ring when she calls him, greets her with what sounds like a muffled cough and a, “Yeah?”

“How’s your Finnish?”

A pause, then, “Passable. Why?”

“How passable?”

“Mitä puuhailet?”

Natasha smiles into the phone; glad he can’t see her and her failure to control herself. He has a distinctly American accent, but he doesn’t sound like he’s reading from a tourist handbook as Clint does. “I found references to a project that Petrov worked on with a handful of scientists, two of them are confirmed Hydra and a third is still alive. I thought we could pay the alive one a visit. If we ask her nicely, maybe we can get a look at the project notes that Petrov thought she has access to.”

“Or in other words: We’re gonna break in and steal everything you can get your hands on.”

“Stealing is such an ugly word. Let’s call it a fact-finding mission,” she says and adds, “Should you choose to accept it.”

James sighs, and for a second Natasha thinks he’ll turn her down. Then he says, “I’m not quite caught up on all the secret agent films. Am I Tom Cruise in this scenario or one of Charlie’s Angels?”

She bites down a grin. “I don’t know. How do you feel about skin-tight outfits and plunging necklines?”

 

* * *

 

The plane ride to Helsinki takes forever.

Is it too much to ask that the next bad guy they have to deal with lives within driving distance of New York? He is spending too much time in flying coffins as it is.

 

Bucky leans against the doorframe that connects his hotel room to Natasha’s and watches her unpack. Clothes go in the closet; a pair of black sneakers goes next to the boots by the door; the book she had been reading on the plane goes on the nightstand. Meticulous. Well-ordered. His clothes are still in his backpack. His unpacking started and ended with him taking the plastic bag with his toiletries to the bathroom. The rest can be removed when he needs it. He left his paperback on top of the backpack, though, for when he can’t fall asleep in a strange place with none of his guns nearby. That last part is stupid, really, he knows he’ll do fine without a gun. He doesn’t need weapons to defend himself. He is one. And he can turn almost anything into a weapon should he need it. But none of that matters. Naked is how he feels. Even with the Black Widow of fame and infamy sleeping next door. (Especially with her sleeping next door.) Scratch stupid, replace with fucking stupid. But that’s not gonna change any time soon.

Natasha doesn’t seem bothered by the lack of weapons. She’d smiled when he’d argued that if Stark can smuggle the two adults with luggage across borders, then a gun shouldn’t pose a problem. But then she could have an arsenal of carbon knives and nylon garrotes stashed away on her person for all that Bucky knows. He’s pretty sure she never takes her widow’s bites off.

He should ask her how she stays so calm.

The first thing he did when entering the hotel room was to draw the blinds. Hers are still open, allowing the sun inside as well as the curious glances of anyone within eyesight. The park across the street can easily hide a sniper, but she moves around the room like it’s the last thing on her mind.

“Are you done brooding, or would you like some more time?” Natasha interrupts his thoughts, her smile teasing and annoyingly catching.

“Funny. You’re very funny. Did anyone ever tell that?”

“Only all of the time.”

He shakes his head at her in mock disbelief. “So, what’s the plan? Do we check out the evil scientist lady’s place now or wait until dark?”

“I thought we might start by getting something to eat.”

 

Getting something to eat turns out to mean walking past a couple of decent looking take-out places and several restaurants and cafes. They’re two miles out of the hotel when Natasha nudges his arm with her elbow and nods at a café on the other side of the street. The windows are low to the ground and they reveal mismatched tables and chairs and an obnoxious number of posters stuck to the wall by the entrance. It looks like a hipster paradise.

Unable to stop himself, Bucky asks, “Really?” with a pointed look at the sign proclaiming the name of the café to be the Brooklyn Café.

“What? I thought you’d appreciate it. Home away from home.” Her accompanying smile is the wide, insincere one she wears when she’s bullshitting him.

There isn’t much traffic on this street, a car drives by every so often and a few pedestrians alone or walking in twos or threes. Even so, flipping her off might draw attention, so he opts to tilt his head at her, and repeats the, “Really?” drawing out the first two syllables.

“Good things come to those who wait.”

“Not in my experience.”

She laughs as if he’s told a joke and crosses the street, apparently expecting him to follow.

The café is half-filled, but aside from a few disinterested glanced, only the waitress behind the counter pays them any attention. She greets them in Finnish and Natasha returns the greeting with a heavy American accent that she hadn’t had when she had chatted with the concierge at the hotel.

The waitress’s smile widens. “Wait, are you American?”

Natasha raises her hands in surrender. “You got me.” Glances over her shoulder at Bucky, says, “See, honey? I told you this place is the best.” Her voice is light and airy and so fake it sets his teeth on edge. He likes it better at her normal level. He likes _her_ better when she’s not so damn plucky and fake.

Bucky makes a noncommittal sound and shoves his gloved hands deeper into his coat pockets.

After they have placed their orders, Natasha asks the waitress for the table in the far corner of the café and leaves him the seat by the back wall. It’s obvious why she does it but trying to thank her will leave him tongue-tied and he sits down without a word. The chair creaks under him and he almost bumps his head on the bookshelf behind him, but it’s better than sitting with his back exposed. The place is a security nightmare. The windows are enormous and at street level. No exits other than the one facing the street. The only piece of furniture that might provide cover from gunfire is the counter and that’s in the next room. They are as good as dead if they are ambushed.

Natasha’s hand reaches towards him out of the abyss opening around him. He does his best not to startle when she plucks a nonexistent piece of lint off his shoulder and pushes the shoulder down when she brushes her hand over it.

“Breathe,” she says in a barely audible voice. “No one knows we’re here and we weren’t followed. Happy tourists. Not targets.” Her eyes look big in a face no longer framed by red hair or maybe that’s the makeup. He can’t tell. The blonde wig makes her look younger. Less serious. Less noticeable, which is probably the idea.

He wants to ask her how she deals with it all. Not just situations like this, but everything life has thrown at her. The soul-crushing guilt. How she remains balanced and calm despite everything. But he can’t. Not here, anyway. Bucky takes a deep breath and slumps on the chair, stretches out a leg next to her chair. He takes his gloves off but keeps his left hand out of sight under the table. “Happy?”

Her smile is small but genuine. “Ecstatic.”

The waitress comes over with a tray filled with their lunch. Two bagels for him, one for Natasha, two plates with waffles smothered in berries, and two mugs of coffee – black for him and an obscene amount of sugar and cream in Natasha’s. It takes some shuffling to find places for everything on the tiny table.

When the waitress is about to leave, Natasha asks, “I’m sorry, but are the books for decoration or…”

“Oh no, they are for reading while you’re here or you can buy some and support a local business.” It sounds like a well-rehearsed sales pitch and it probably is.

“Thanks! Maybe I will.” Cheerful and obnoxiously chipper.

Aside from a few comments about the food, they eat in silence. It’s sorta nice, better than whatever fake conversation they might hold with other guests within earshot. The food is good, if not what Bucky had in mind when they left the hotel. Maybe if he’d be able to relax for more than a minute or two at a time, he might enjoy this. He actually _wants_  to enjoy this. How often does he get to eat in the company of a pretty dame, let alone one this beautiful? Not very fucking often. Hasn’t happened in nearly a century.

For once, thoughts about the differences between his past and his present strikes Bucky as funny instead of sad. He realizes that his quiet mirth hasn’t been as quiet as he means it to be when Natasha tilts her head at him.

“Are you going to share with the class or keep me guessing?” she says with an expression that looks more amused than her dry tone suggests.

He discards half a dozen possible answers, finally says, “This is nice,” which is as close to the truth he can get while out in public.

It earns him a crooked smile. “Yeah, it is.”

Her eyes are full of warmth and he realizes that they aren’t completely green. There are flecks of brown surrounding her pupils, so pale they look golden.

And for the next fifteen minutes, Bucky manages to focus on something other than escape routes and how to create defensible layouts in open-plan rooms.

 

When they are done eating, Natasha stands to browse the bookshelves behind him while he pulls on his gloves under the table. She picks a few books out but puts all but two back after having read the blurb on the back. The ones that meet her indecipherable criteria are a paperback that he doesn’t catch the title of, and a poem collection by Pushkin. She places both on the table to put on her coat and he follows her lead and puts on his own.

Since she doesn’t explain the books despite his open curiosity, Bucky asks, “Dare I ask why?” and points to them.

She shoots him one of the indecipherable looks that he’s beginning to think means that she’s picking her words and not that she’s judging him for whatever he just said. Finally, she opens the poetry collection, flips to a seemingly random page, and presses her index and middle finger against the page. “This is the poem I was telling you about earlier.”

For a good long while, he stares at the page with incomprehension. They haven’t talked about any poems. Or any poets for that matter. Then he spots the outline between her two fingers. Oblong and jagged. A key hidden between the pages, left for her to find. “Ah, okay,” He casts about for something to say to not sound like a fucking idiot. “I still think Pushkin’s too stuffy. Bukowski on the other hand. That man could write poems that meant something.”

She smiles with delight and for a second the meticulous façade slips as she bites her lip. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Not enough alcohol-fueled musings in Pushkin’s poems.”

“You say alcohol-fueled. I say inspired.”

She snickers and makes her way to the counter, and he follows. Natasha reaches the counter before him and he retaliates for her paying for their lunch by holding the door open for her when they leave. The raised eyebrow makes Bucky want to grin, but he maintains a stoic expression until she’s past him to wind her up further.

A few blocks later, she takes the Pushkin book out of the paper bag the waitress put the books in, slips it into a coat pocket, and holds the paper bag out to him. “A gift for you.”

He opens the bag and looks inside. The book has a picture of a manically happy and somewhat cross-eyed raccoon on the cover. He looks from it to Natasha. “Why?”

“It’s an interesting read,” she says. “And you need to cheer the fuck up.”

He tries not to grin. He really does. “That’s real subtle.”

She’s watching his reaction closely. Her eyes are big and serious and for the first time, he realizes that she has tells. They are damn near impossible to pick up on, but they are there. One of them is the uncanny level of control she has over her expressions and body language. With anyone else, he’d expect a twitch of the lips in response to his grin. Or a faint line of worry between the brows when he doesn’t react with gratitude. Micro expression, he thinks they are called. There hasn’t been any since she gave him the book. She looks one hundred percent serious and attentive. “Well, I am a very experienced spy,” Natasha says without a trace of irony.

That cracks him up. His laughter catches the attention of the dogwalker across the street and for once he doesn’t care. “You’re full of shit, lady, that’s what you are.”

She laughs at that. Damn near sounds like a giggle. “You know what they say about people living in glasshouses,” she says in an airy tone that used to make his bullshit-o-meter flip out. “Now, the next stop on this lovely walk is the train station. To pick up a package from a friend of a friend.”

That explains the treasure hunt and the sparse intel. One of Natasha's own contacts would have dropped off the package directly instead of hiding the key to a train station locker at a second location. But this one might not want to be associated with an Avenger or the Black Widow, judging by the choice of book to hide the key in. It makes Bucky wonder, but he knows better than to ask. A spy never reveals their contacts.

 

“Can I just say that I love your friend of a friend,” says Bucky when they are back at the hotel. The backpack they picked up in a locker at the train station had been filled with everything he could wish for. Two Sig-Sauers for him, two Glock 26s for Natasha, an honest-to-God Gerber Mark II knife that she'd gotten for him (“Oh, no. I prefer my knives to be a lot more subtle than that”), as much ammo as they can carry, night vision goggles, and a set of lock picks.

 

Casing the place is easy. They circle the surrounding area before entering the enclave of similar-looking houses. The house itself doesn’t look anything like what he had expected. It’s semi-attached and a little run-down, but so are the houses surrounding it. A closer inspection reveals matching curtains in both halves of the house, so they won’t have to worry about a neighbor hearing them when they break into the place. Add to that security alarm system that’s so old that Bucky could bypass with one arm tied behind his back and it seems like a piece of cake.

It’s full dark by the time they are done with the recon.

They walk the streets in silence. Their footsteps form a disjointed rhythm since Natasha takes three steps for every two of his. Helsinki is a large city and they aren’t alone in the streets even this late, so Bucky doesn’t find the three figures walking about three-hundred feet behind them odd at first. When they are still there several minutes later, he brushes against Natasha’s arm and indicates that they should turn left at the next corner.

She hooks her arm through his and murmurs, “You noticed them, too?”

Awkwardly shortening his steps to match hers, he bends his arm and tries to look like walking arm in arm while being stalked by random assholes is totally normal and not at all something that makes him tense up. “Spotted them after we left the evil scientist lady’s neighborhood.”

“And you’re afraid there might be a connection.”

She didn’t phrase it as a question, but he answers anyway. “Yeah. Maybe. It’s odd.”

“There’s a park up ahead. I say, we go there and ask them a few questions.” There’s a sharp edge to her voice. Bucky likes that very much.

“You’re a woman after my own heart,” he says with a flash of cockiness that dies when Natasha doesn’t answer. His words echo in the empty space between his ears where his brain ought to be. Shit. They were getting on so well and he had to ruin it by trying to flirt while on a job. Way to behave like a professional, buddy.

The would-be stalkers provide a welcome distraction by reducing their numbers by one and gaining on them, but the park is already within reach. It’s a good choice for an impromptu interrogation. The park has a rocky outcrop jutting out of the grass and a few clumps of trees that’ll provide cover. The gravel-covered paths make it easy to keep track of the stalkers. The latter is proven when they are a hundred feet into the park and the sound of twin sets of treads follow them. Bucky doesn’t have to look behind him to confirm that the stalkers have gained even more on them.

“Kiss me,” says Natasha.

He somehow doesn’t trip over his own feet. “What?” It comes out harder than he intends.

“By those trees. Kiss me and pretend like you like that sort of thing.”

Pretend. He doesn’t know if he should feel insulted or relieved that she didn’t notice him staring at her like she was the second coming during lunch. Bucky swallows his pride (again) and studies the trees she indicates. Strategically, it makes sense. It lets them pick the spot for the confrontation. The outcrop and the trees provide a handy cover and spot forces the third stalker to either wade through fallen leaves between the trees or use the path with crunchy gravel. All he has to do is to buckle the fuck up and stop acting like a thirteen old.

Natasha slows down when they reach the trees and looks up like she’s studying the night sky through the trees. Questions burn on his tongue, but there is no time to ask them. He turns to face her, pretends not to notice the stalkers now frozen in their tracks eighty feet back, and reaches up to rest the tips of his fingers along the line of her jaw, glad that his left hand never shakes. He should say something, make a joke, tell her to watch out for the third stalker, but his mouth is bone dry. The stalkers are seventy feet away and he can’t tear his eyes away from her lips as she parts them. He lowers his head to kiss her, his eyes closing reflexively.

Her lips are softer than he’s dreamed they’d be. The only thing that keeps him present and sane is the crunch of gravel under feet. Fifty feet away now.

His first kiss in nearly a century and it’s an act. How’s that for irony.

(It’s all he can do to not wrap his arms around her and deepen the kiss.)

She’s not helping. Her hands slide up his chest, then down again and it’s not till his jacket falls open that he realizes that Natasha has unzipped it to allow him access to the Sig- Sauers holstered at his sides. Right. At least she’s keeping her head clear.

Twenty feet away now.

Her hair smells like Christmas morning and he wants to bury his face in it. If there’s a God, the stalkers will keep walking.

One of the stalkers says, “Anteeks.”

“What?” This time it doesn’t come out harder than Bucky intends, it comes out like the snarl he means it to be.

The closest one takes a step back. His dumber companion waves a switchblade knife at Bucky and says, “Your money or your life,” like he’s a big man and not barely out of his teens.

Natasha turns towards the two would-be muggers, says, “I don’t think so.”

Neither of the two recognizes the danger she poses. It’s gonna be fun to watch their expressions change when they realize how much they have fucked up by trying to mug the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier. (Small mercies, the amusement lessens the keen loss of her touch.)

The first one sneers at her. “No one asked you, bitch.”

“Language,” Bucky says and hears the echo of Ma Rogers’ voice across the gulf of years.

The second kid, the one who startled and now needs to make up for it, says, “Shut up, grandpa, and hand over the fucking money.”

The third is nowhere to be seen. He is easily heard, though, dead leaves crunch under his feet as he stomps between the trees with the grace of a flock of elephants. There’s a chance that someone without enhanced senses might not hear him. It’s not that big.

“Do you want to deal with them or should I?” Bucky asks Natasha to the annoyance of the would-be muggers.

“Oh, no. You do it. I don’t want to get blood on my coat.”

The kid with the knife splutters, but Bucky interrupts him with a, “Hold on one second, will ya?” He whips around, grabs the elephant trying to sneak up on them by the neck, and slams him into the tree next to them. The air goes out of the kid with a whoosh and fear fills the available space. Up close he looks barely old enough to vote. Bucky loosens his grip to let him breathe again. The kid clutches at Bucky’s arm and Bucky prays to God that his leather jacket and shirt are thick enough to mask the unyielding metal underneath. Bucky tells him, “Don’t be an idiot,” and turns to the other two. “How about this: You get your friend back alive and we all go our separate ways?”

The kid with the knife smirks. “No deal.”

Too late, Bucky realizes that the elephant is only holding on to his arm with one hand. There’s a flash of silver as the kid’s other hand pummels towards Bucky’s arm, then the sound of metal against metal as the knife rips through Bucky’s coat and glances off his arm. Bucky slams the kid’s head against the tree, knocking him out, and drops the limp body. He turns in time to see the other two drop to the ground convulsing with sparking metal disks on their throats.

The fight is over before it began.

“Do you still want to ask them questions?” Natasha asks as she empties out the would-be muggers’ pockets and picks off the spent Taser Disks.

“Not much point is there?” He bends to pick up the knife and snaps it in two before he rifles through the elephant’s pockets. The pickings are slim. In one pocket he finds a knuckle buster that he likewise snaps in two, in another a wallet that reveals the age of the kid – two months from turning nineteen – but nothing else of interest. “If they knew who we are and were coming for us, they’d have been packing a lot more than switchblades and knuckle busters. And if they were guards, they wouldn’t have been packing either.”

She looks at him with an expression he can’t get a read on in the dim light, then nods and hides her face completely in the shadows. Without another word, she begins to walk towards their hotel.

Bucky falls into step next to her, trying not to think about the kiss or how cold his arm feels now that it no longer has her arm hooked through it.

After a while, Natasha says, “For a centenarian, you’re a pretty good kisser,” in an airy tone.

It catches him off balance. “I’m sorry, what?”

“A better kisser. You. For a centenarian.”

“You’ve kissed a lot of them?” he says, fully aware that he’ll be better off not knowing the answer.

“Well,” she says, and he knows what comes next before she continues, “Only two. You and Steve.”

He has no business being jealous. No business whatsoever. Fighting to keep his tone even, he says, “Can I get that in writing? Being a better kisser than Captain America kinda beats being a former Hydra assassin.”

Her resulting laughter crushes the green-eyed demon. Natasha bumps her hip against his thigh. “Don’t sell yourself short. Former Hydra _super_ assassin has a nice ring to it.”

“Says the former Soviet super spy.”

She hooks her arm through his. “Takes one to know one.”

This time, he gets to enjoy the walk back to the hotel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation of the Finnish dialogue:  
> Mitä puuhailet: What are you up to?  
> Anteeks: Excuse me.


End file.
